Look for Jeff Rotman in rough, cold seas, and you’ll find him right at home.
“For me, being in the water feels just as comfortable as being on land,” he said. “I don’t think, ‘I’m in the water.’ I don’t think about what I’m doing. I’m just in the water. I react naturally. I’ve fallen asleep underwater.”
The Lawrence resident has a passion for photojournalism, and has been working for the past 10 years to focus specifically on documenting the health and the destruction of the oceans.
Rotman, 63, has more than four decades of diving experience, and said staying in top physical condition is necessary for his work.
“I don’t think I’m the most talented underwater photographer out there, but I think I’m one of the most hardworking underwater photographers out there,” he said. “When most people would have to get out of the water, that’s when I’m just warming up.”
For some shoots, he’s started at 6 a.m. and stayed in the water until midnight.
Rotman’s photos reflect the passion he’s always had for animals and natural history. The Boston native taught science at the junior high level for seven years, and during his summers off, his passion for diving in the cold New England ocean began to surface.
When Rotman first began diving, what started as a hobby quickly became an obsession when he began photographing animals underwater. His background is gorilla diving, which is diving in cold, temperate oceans. Conditions are rougher in the colder water and divers require extra material to keep warm.
It’s those conditions he often seeks out, rather than the warm water tropical shoots many underwater photographers gravitate toward.
Rotman has a strict criteria for selecting dive locations: the area must be doable, but not overdone, it must have some noteworthy aspects, and it must have something happening—something tied to the ecology of the ocean.
Casual divers won’t see what’s happening with the naked eye—unless they know what they’re looking for. In many cases, the changes taking place are not visible in the life beneath sea level, but the life that’s no longer there. Eventually, Rotman’s focus became an investigation of the human imprint on the ocean.
One prominent example is the Red Sea, home to beautiful coral reefs that can captivate divers who don’t have a deeper knowledge of what they should be expecting below sea level.
“But if you understand this marine ecosystem, you’ll realize that all the big animals are gone … There’s lots of corals, but everything is out of whack. It’s out of balance,” Rotman said.
Sea dwellers like sharks, manta rays, giant groupers and sea turtles have all been fished out or scared away after years of abuse to their natural habitat.
Overfishing and shark finning (when sharks’ fins are removed and the fish left to die; shark fins are prized in Chinese culture) are just a few of the many topics he’s brought to the surface with his images. Artisan fishing, which is normally done on a smaller scale and uses traditional, simpler fishing methods like nets and harpoons, is on a continuing decline, giving way to more large-scale modern commercial fishing practices that contribute more rapidly to the disruption of the natural fish populations.
Populations such as the codfish have collapsed because of overfishing, and part of the problem, Rotman said, is that the destruction taking place isn’t understood by scientists. And the even bigger problem is the baseline used to measure the types of changes over time.
“I don’t pretend to understand everything, but I know how screwed up things are,” Rotman said. “Because I’m going into areas … and looking at areas that I saw 40 years ago, and I see a different place altogether.”
To look back only 20 years, Rotman said, doesn’t show an accurate measure of the changes in the environment’s conditions. Rotman believes the baseline should be set at 200 years ago for a proper analysis and comparison.
Rotman’s work hasn’t gone unnoticed. He was recognized as the BBC Underwater Wildlife Photographer of the Year and twice won the National Press Photographers Award for Science Pictures of the Year. He’s also published 21 books for both adults and children.
But shooting underwater is expensive—sometimes $30,000-40,000 a shoot—and “you can’t spend 365 days a year underwater,” Rotman said.
Even without his underwater adventures, Rotman had a sense for investigative photojournalism.
Drawn by his fascination with the Red Sea, Rotman had moved to Israel in 1980. When the Sinai peninsula and Red Sea, where he was diving at the time, were returned to Egyptian ownership, Rotman set his sights on land and began taking on political assignments.
Those assignments landed him in the middle of vastly different cultures for days and weeks at a time, along the way developing relationships with a number of contacts who helped him gain inside access.
Rotman said it was uncommon for most photojournalists at the time, but he financed his own shoots as much as he could, and hand-picked writers to accompany him on his adventures. It allowed him to choose his own assignments and sell his stories to multiple publications; sometimes the stories ran numerous times in a 3–4 year period. Soon he found himself paying off contacts for a glimpse inside a hidden cocaine lab in Bolivia and trekking through the Amazon to live for 10 days among a tribe of cannibals.
He refers to that side of investigative photojournalism as his era of “sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.” His photos have appeared in a number of publications, including Time Magazine, National Geographic and more.
Because of the topics he was covering and situations he had to face—on several assignments he investigated anti-terrorism stories—Rotman tried to plan accordingly to minimize any danger or risk.
“What I learned early on was that I want to be around for a long time,” he said. “And the idea is you make it look dangerous, but don’t be stupid.”
“When I would put myself in a compromising situation, I weigh everything very, very carefully, and I want to make absolutely certain that I’m gonna come out of this OK. Perhaps I do take some chances, but they’re chances that have been well, well thought out.”
Before he ventured toward the Bolivian cocaine lab, he ran through his mind the issues that might come up. So when the time came that he was blindfolded and escorted through the jungle, he made sure he brought with him a few pairs of women’s nylons.
The workers pulled the nylons over their heads, distorting their faces enough that they wouldn’t be recognized in pictures, and allowed Rotman to photograph them.
It was one of his many explosive stories published, as photos of workers with stockings pulled over their faces showed another side of cocaine use.
Though he doesn’t do much of the “sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll” photojournalism anymore, Rotman said he’s used the sales of his stories to finance his underwater career.
In mid-December, he had just returned from a shoot in New England. He continues his quest to make people aware of the urgency of understanding the oceans, and also works with organizations like WildAid and Greenpeace.
“It’s not a minute before midnight, it’s way after midnight, and we’re not gonna be able to go back to where we were,” he said. “But the damage that we’ve done is just incredible, just amazing. We don’t understand it yet.”
For more information about Jeff Rotman or to see more of his photos, go online to jeffrotman.com.
,
