In 2021, off the island of Fuvahmulah in the Maldives, photographer Matt Porteous was on the sea floor as a three-and-a-half-metre tiger shark passed directly over him. He surfaced, he says, a different person. "My life changed forever. I'd never experienced wildlife like that. I hadn't experienced nature like that." He has spent much of the time since trying, and largely failing, to put language around the viscerality of the experience. "I speak to people about this connection they have with nature, and no one can really explain it. It's almost like we haven't got a word for it in English."
Porteous, who has photographed the British royal family, co-founded the storytelling collective Ocean Culture Life in 2019 with Tamsin Raine, a former advertising executive turned ocean advocate. Both grew up on Jersey — Porteous surfing after school, Raine "never more than ten minutes from the sea." Neither has much patience for the standard conservation pitch of charts, statistics and a slow drip of bad news. "We don't respond to fear very well as humans," Raine says. "How can we possibly feel like we're going to be part of positive change if that's all we're learning and listening to?"
The ocean ... is "the heartbeat of our planet," regulating the climate, helping produce the oxygen we breathe
The ocean, in her description, is "the heartbeat of our planet," regulating the climate, helping produce the oxygen we breathe, invisibly enough that most people never think about it until they're made to. "I can tell you every day that the ocean generates the oxygen you breathe," she says, "but you're not really going to swallow that until you feel it for yourself."
From 19th to 31st October, the pair bring that conviction to COMO Cocoa Island, in a programme built on the belief that people are more likely to protect something once they have a relationship with it. Days move from a photography session on land into the shallows, a guided snorkel to put the lessons into practice, then an afternoon editing, with no camera experience required. Alongside it run Porteous’s portrait workshops, built around a family day on the water and sunset light, and Marine Capture Sessions with the resort's marine specialists. A pop-up studio shows prints and books from the collective's archive, and a screening evening runs films from storytellers it has supported elsewhere — an attempt, Raine says, to get guests thinking of "one interconnected ocean" rather than a single destination. A children's programme including shell scavenger hunts runs alongside.
COMO Cocoa Island makes a persuasive setting largely because the reef is so close. Raine describes the unusual benefit of practically being able to "roll yourself out of bed onto the reef" with no boat and no long swim required. During her last visit, in February, Raine was also struck by the diversity of marine life and by the small-fish nurseries growing around coral restoration frames trialled by the resort’s marine team. "A lot of reefs in the Maldives are suffering, and they're not all as abundant as what you've got at COMO Cocoa Island," she says. Guests might see reef sharks, rays, resident parrotfish and clownfish, and, on a lucky day, a passing whale shark.
Spend long enough on the same stretch of reef, Porteous says, and fish stop registering as flashes of colour and start to emerge as different characters; they “almost have their own languages.” A parrotfish becomes recognisably bossy; clownfish defend their patch. Raine’s plan for her return to COMO Cocoa Island is to find an octopus and visit it daily. “I’m going to make friends with it,” she says.
Seeing more also demands moving differently. Porteous’s rules for interacting with wildlife are simple: treat it the way you would on land. "You don't chase after a dog when you first see it,” says Porteous; “if you see a turtle or a ray, you let it come to you." Move at the pace of a passing school of fish, he says, rather than swimming at it, and it won't scatter; "it's about slowing everything down, and just allowing nature to come to you."
The ethic extends beyond the animals: the reefs of the Maldives are not merely photogenic, Raine points out, but support fisheries, tourism and local communities. "It's not just about going in and taking photos and extracting these stories. It's about understanding what these reefs and this ocean actually bring."
For Porteous, whether the camera is above or below water, the throughline is storytelling. "Whether I'm photographing a family or I'm in the ocean, it's one story of somebody's life that I'm able to capture." Photographs preserve a particular kind of moment: time away from work, something discovered together, an animal seen for the first time. They are a way of keeping a question alive after the trip has ended: an image on a wall, a book left out on a table, a story told again at dinner. “What was that? Why did it affect me? What else is there to learn?”
He finds that capturing a good image depends more on feeling than technique. "It's really about light and connection, and the individual human story of how that moment made them feel,” he says; “it’s about the ability to ask the questions people don’t ask, and see the things that a lot of people just let go by.”
COMO Journey: Ocean Culture Life runs at COMO Cocoa Island from 19th to 31st October. For more information, please contact our concierge team.
