THE BIG ISLAND PROJECT
The Big Island Project
I started this project the last time I went to visit my family on the Big Island for my niece's 14th birthday. I was reflecting on how I tend to not tell people where I’m going, that I’m “just visiting my folks”, so I don’t have to deal with the Oh wow, Hawai’i! Must be nice, Wish I could go to Hawai’i, etc., etc. I bet you take a lot of photos. I don’t. I rarely take any photos and haven’t brought a camera with me other than my phone for years. Every time I slip and say where I’m going, I postface it with, “It’s not Mai Tais and swimming with dolphins” and “I’m sharing a bedroom wall with my parents miles from the beach”. I love my parents, but still. And I love Hawaii. Hawaii is beautiful and magical and diverse. It messes with my sleep, haunts me, even, and despite my mom and her mom being born there, my grandfather and his father being born there, and the fact that I’ve been visiting nearly every year since the age of two and have lived and worked there briefly a couple of times, I still feel like an outsider. Not a local, in other words.
I’m also very protective of the islands. When friends who have visited talk about wanting to move there, I respond with how multiple generations live under one roof because Hawai’i is so expensive. And that everyone has multiple jobs because Hawaii is so expensive. Hawai’i is expensive for a number of reasons, but colonialism is a big one. I feel terrible that I make them feel bad, but I just get so protective. We all have blinders on when we’re tourists. It’s easy not to see the rusting rotting plantation house that my auntie lived in in Pauilo where I got devoured by mosquitoes. Or the rotting cars in the gulch because there’s nowhere else to take them or it’s too expensive to make them go away, or the hundreds of roadside memorials because drinking and driving and dying young is a major problem on the island, or the obesity in the native Hawaiians because America. One time, when I was living there, someone visiting asked me why locals don’t have any homeowner’s pride. I told him that they couldn’t afford to. That they have five jobs and are taking care of their parents, grandparents, children, nieces and nephews and have no time or money to work on the house.
But Hawai’i is so much more than what I’ve just written. She has magic deep in her bones, you always know when Pele is grumpy with the world - earthquakes followed by eruptions. The Night Marchers visit me in my dreams every single time I visit. I still fancy that I see Menehunes in the forest at night like my uncles used to tell me in stories when I was a kid. Hawaii is a part of me in more ways than I recognize. I’ve tried to ignore her, but she always always makes me turn my head and look her way.
So, this project is born out of me wanting to share what I consider to be the real Hawai’i. The Hawai’i not often seen or noticed by others. Exploring and capturing the Big Island. It’s called the Big Island Project because I only really know the Big Island. The islands are all different in their way and I can’t claim to have knowledge of them. In these photos you will see moments, objects, bits of Hawai’i. Portraits, food, animals, the ʻāina as I see and feel her. Using my phone, my DSLR and an old Ricoh TLR that I found at an estate sale, I hope to capture the beauty and cultural diversity and magic that is Hawaii. That is the Big Island.
This is an ongoing project and new images will be shared throughout the project.