A Photographer’s Unseen Archive of the Hawaiian Renaissance

What to do with a photographic archive that can’t be viewed? This sounds like the premise of a Jorge Luis Borges short story, but the question haunts the half-century of photography taken by Franco Salmoiraghi, the Illinois-born photographer who has documented life and art in Hawaii since he moved to the islands in 1968. Because the Hawaiian Renaissance from the 1960s to the 2000s saw a flourishing of Native Hawaiian, or Kanaka Maoli, art and cultural practices, his black-and-white images—usually taken with a medium-format camera, or one of several Leicas—document the rebirth of interest in music, dance, navigation, food, and other traditional ways of life termed aloha ʻāina. Next year, his image of Hawaiian kuma hula (hula master) Edith Kanakaʻole will circulate widely, having been chosen to appear on a new US quarter.

Some of what Salmoiraghi has been invited to document by the Native Hawaiian community has been sacred: burial sites, makahiki (annual religious celebrations), and cultural practices conducted both at protests and in private. For this reason, some of his best-known work can be seen, at his request, only through collaboration with Hawaii’s community of Kanaka Maoli activists, scholars, and curators. A recent exhibitionat the Honolulu bookstore Arts & Letters Nu‘uanu, titled I Ola Kanaloa! I Ola Kākou! Photographs of Kaho‘olawe, 1976–1987, documents trips Salmoiraghi made to the island of Kaho’olawe during the peak of the Hawaiian Renaissance in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It featured eleven archival photographs and a dozen contemporary reprints selected in collaboration with Protect Kaho‘olawe ‘Ohana, the grassroots group of Native Hawaiian aloha ʻāina activists that cares for the island.

Salmoiraghi moved to Hawaii on an invitation from the University of Hawaii to teach darkroom photography in 1968, after studying photojournalism at Southern Illinois University and earning an MFA in photography in Athens, Ohio. His aunt and uncle had once sent his family a postcard from Waikiki, and he remembers having seen The Don Ho Show, but he’d never previously visited the state. Immediately upon his arrival over winter break, the state’s archaeology department asked him to photograph sites along a long road being constructed from Waimea to Kailua-Kona. Officials air-dropped him in a remote lava field, amid ancient stone houses that were later destroyed.

In an archive of half a million negatives, Salmoiraghi eschews easy romanticism for a look at the cultural contradictions of life and landscapes in America’s newest state. 

Throughout the 1970s, a period of extensive commercial development in Hawaii, the Hawaiian state hired Salmoiraghi to document historic sites on the islands. Later, the Native Hawaiian community invited him to photograph land-back protests (starting with Waipiʻo Valley in 1974) and religious ceremonies. Over coffee at Fendu café in his neighborhood of Manoa, he recently described to me his subjects as places “you cannot buy your way in. There is no price. Like fate dropping me off in that helicopter for a week on that lava field.” His gelatin-silver prints of Hawaiian people and landscapes evoke aspects of the lucid magic of the photographer Peter Henry Emerson; Salmoiraghi himself references Cartier-Bresson. “I like to print full frame, no cropping, some spotting,” he says.

In an archive of half a million negatives, he eschews easy romanticism for a look at the cultural contradictions of life and landscapes in America’s newest state. One sees derelict industrial sugar mills and historic sites, vast fields of taro and native flowers that feel lit from within with metaphoric meaning, and portraits of families who have lived on the land behind them forever. Others photographing and filming the Hawaiian Renaissance include Phil Spalding, Ed Greevy, and Francis Haar. Of this group, Salmoiraghi’s prints have perhaps the most deft and uncanny touch.

His Kaho‘olawe images, for instance, tell the story of the struggle for land and self-determination. The island was repeatedly bombed by the US military, and its use as target practice rendered it inaccessible and dotted with unexploded mines. Letters on display at Arts & Letters Nu‘uanu, between the activist George Helm, Salmoiraghi, and the Navy, document the process of the group of activists obtaining permission from the US military to conduct cultural ceremonies on the island. The group of Native Hawaiian aloha ‘aina leaders, including Noa Emmett Aluli, Walter Ritte, and Aunty Emma DeFries, was eventually able to do them in the presence of the Navy’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal personnel. In the photographs, the activists look ragtag with their shag haircuts, guitars, cutoff shorts, and kalo cookouts. The prints, on warm Agfa paper, render cultural protest both quotidian and glowing. As a result of these interventions, the Navy stopped the bombings in 1990; in 2003, the US military returned the island to the state of Hawaii. Today, as the Navy’s pollution of urban Honolulu’s major aquifer from ongoing leakage of the once-secret Red Hill military fuel-storage facility is under scrutiny, the exhibition of the PKO protests at Kaho’olawe was a timely reminder of a recent past when protest changed the fate of the land. 

What viewers cannot see are images that the Native community deems sacred. One, which Salmoiraghi described to me, shows a man “chanting [another man] into invisibility,” as the photographer put it. In another set of photographs deemed kapu, or taboo, women beat kapa, or mulberry paper. The collaborative discussion initiated by Salmoiraghi with members of PKO about what may and may not be shown adds to the contemporary interest of exhibitions of his historical work. Salmoiraghi cites several “five-hour meetings” leading to the selection of the images. “There is a tremendous amount of protocol in the Hawaiian culture,” he says. The Kanaka Maoli curator Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick, who helped organize the exhibition, adds, “Some of the moments Franco witnessed and recorded are appropriate for public display and some are not. Knowing the difference is how we demonstrate our understanding and sense of responsibility.”

Salmoiraghi’s negatives are contact printed, and in his vast archive, images of the sacred mix with ones that might reasonably be shown, complicating the very act of preserving his life’s work. What can and can’t be shown also changes over time, with photographs that were once carried or widely shown on the sides of trucks at protests in the 1970s retroactively considered kapu by the community today. The dangers are not only in showing what was never meant to be seen, or seen only by certain groups. “My grandsons are part Hawaiian. I have a lot of feeling for them,” says Salmoiraghi. He would like to preserve the archive, he adds, decades into the future for Hawaiians to see what happened during the 1970s and ’80s, in part because he fears the commercial exploitation of sacred images on merchandise that target tourists. His archive is in constant conversation with contemporary notions of the sacred and the unseeable—and its preservation is essential.

“Photography is about stories,” Salmoiraghi says. “Even if you come home without a photograph, you lose your film, for example, you still have that experience. This is what my whole life in photography has been about.”