Photographer Luca Martinez Shows the Everglades as You've Never Seen It
BY JENNIFER REED
September 01, 2023
The Florida native uses his adventurous spirit and knack for storytelling to capture the swamp's natural splendor.
Photo by Dan Cutrona
Until this assignment, I didn’t know the work of photographer Luca Martinez. But my 18-year-old daughter sure did. “You’re interviewing him?” she asks when I mention my upcoming call. “I follow him. His stuff is always on my feed.”
“You know he’s your age, right?” I ask.
Yes, the next great conservation photographer is a teenager from Miami, who has amassed more than 200,000 Instagram followers, tallied 150 million TikTok views, caught the eye of documentary filmmaker Phil Fairclough, produced an online Everglades exhibition for Google Arts & Culture with the Everglades Foundation, authored an article for Oceanographic magazine and its global audience, and served as a keynote speaker at events such as a World Water Day celebration, held at Florida Gulf Coast University last March.
If I had to guess, Luca would tell me to q uit listing accolades and dedicate my word count allotment to the subject of his lens: the Florida Everglades. Even as the media devote more coverage to environmental matters and the government pours billions into Everglades restoration, the young man finds a “dangerous disconnect” between the average Floridian—including young people like him—and the River of Grass. “It’s just not being taught,” he says of Florida’s imperiled ecosystem. “To me, the Everglades was dangerous. I was taught it was dirty. And, honestly, that a good swamp is a drained swamp.”
Luca was a teenager before he stepped foot in the Everglades, but his fascination with the outdoors emerged early, inspired by regular outings to his grandfather’s vacation home in the Florida Keys. He could snorkel before he could walk—a skill he would later deploy to capture groundbreaking images of the underwater Everglades ecosystem. He got his first GoPro camera when he was 9 and his first DSLR, a Nikon D-3500, at 13 as a Christmas gift, when he was seized by a desire to capture nature in action. (Incidentally, he has purchased nearly all his own gear ever since, through the sale of his images or commercial gigs.)
