Volume 39, Number 11
Diversions/Arts
By Owen Schaefer
Exposing a Different Hawaii
It’s hard to take a bad photo in Hawaii. With stunning beaches and precipitous cliffs in the viewfinder, even amateur snapshots come out looking like postcards. But photographer Daido Moriyama has certainly done what he can to make sure that his work will never have “Wish you were here,” scrawled across the back.
Moriyama’s current show, titled Hawaii, demonstrates that the well-known photographer has, over the years, defined and refined his own personal language of photography. And despite being best known for his work in the gritty urban centers of Japan, he is also capable of using that language to describe less-familiar spaces. Moriyama’s Hawaii may not be the postcard-perfect destination most people imagine, but it is very much his own.
The current show is really two exhibitions: the first being a 1965–2005 retrospective of some of the photographer’s most famous work, and the second, a selection of his Hawaiian shots taken between 2004 and 2007. The retrospective is a great place to start for those unfamiliar with Moriyama, and includes a number of quotes that give some insight into his process and philosophies.
Moriyama started his career in the 60s—a period of upheaval for many photographers, who were beginning to question photographic methods and rules. He shocked viewers and critics with his frank and off-kilter images, as well as his attitude that all things photographed were of equal value. He published shots of car crashes and cats, streetlamps and TV screens, poster ads, and people, partly in search of a photographic “reality,” but mostly just to show that he could.
So much of Moriyama’s portfolio is taken up by city streets that it is difficult to even imagine him standing in the Hawaiian sand. That feeling gets echoed in one documentary film included as part of the exhibition, which shows Moriyama in jeans and a T-shirt, taking photo after photo as he wanders along sunny beaches and through tourist towns looking intense and vaguely awkward. Moriyama takes photos like a man starved for light. Anything and everything goes, and the 100 or so prints being shown in the museum’s fourth-floor gallery are only a fraction of what has been published in his Hawaii catalogue.
The exhibition floor is divided roughly in half, with the first section seemingly devoted to freeing the audience of any Hawaiian stereotypes they may have walked in with. Dozens of the images not only avoid a postcard tone, but could have been shot anywhere. Moriyama explores Honolulu and Hilo’s side streets and abandoned lots almost as if he were in Tokyo, shooting motorcycles, shop fronts and harried tourists. For a time, the beach seems only a distant daydream.
But the most striking shots are those which are both clearly Hawaii and clearly Moriyama—a gleaming, rain-soaked road winding through a field of lava; the ear-like folds of a large shell on display in a tourist shop; a couple on the beach who sit gazing at a colorless rainbow, with Moriyama’s own shadow hovering slyly behind them.
Without the requisite blues of ocean and sky, without the green of palm trees or the dappling of Hawaiian flowers, the islands are transformed into a land of hard light and shadow. Under Moriyama’s chiaroscuro touch, white tropical sunlight pours uncontrollably down from the sky and barges in through windows. The effect can be chilly and alien at times, and also remarkably beautiful. Moriyama’s scattershot approach to his subjects stubbornly refuses to become documentary or narrative, and leaves us squinting into the darker corners of a Hawaii we thought we knew.