Scottish photographer Peter Iain Campbell captures post-industrial landscapes and oil rigs in the North Sea, an environment he became familiar and intimate with by working offshore for two years. Campbell’s documentation and survey of landscapes in the process of being decommissioned account for a petromelancholic aesthetic (LeMenager, 2014) and serve as an archive of this isolated and liminal space, tied to its end. This paper will examine the tensions and interplays between industrial and marine forces at work in Campbell’s photographs, oscillating between movement and stasis, the graphic and the organic, texture and abstraction, scale and colour contrasts. At times, the images move away from and challenge different aesthetic principles such as the technological sublime (Nye, 1994) and extractive poetics (Campbell, 2019). Instead, the photographs give rise to an elemental, marine poetics. We will argue for an ecocritical reading of the photographs while establishing the characteristics of a marine poetics in Peter Iain Campbell’s work where the marine element becomes central and “is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence” (Buell, 1995), as the photographic series’ title Ask the Sea suggests. Beyond a voice given to the sea in the photographs, the sea also exerts a form of resistance against the human presence in the landscapes, a resistance together with other nonhuman elements, echoing that of the sky and winds. The sea is ultimately given agency and becomes an active participant in the creative process of some of the photographs.