Land Division
The photographs in this portfolio were created as part of an extended project, spurred by a 2016 commission from a photography biennial in Tianshui, China. Instead of working along the Silk Road as asked, I proposed to photograph Oahu. This is where my mother,accompanied by my brother, moved to study in the mid-nineteen-nineties, and like so many migrants before, chose to remain. When I took my first picture, I had just accepted a new faculty position in western New York, and though I had never lived in Hawai‘i, photographing here promised a familiar and familial connection. I walked out of my brother’s and sister-in-law’s rented apartment in Kaimuki with a 6×9 cm scale focusing camera hanging from my neck and lifted it to frame the nearest Albizia tree. I write from my current vantage point as a first-semester Assistant Professor of Photography at UH Mānoa, which, seven years since, brought me here with my young family from Buffalo. Everything suddenly looks different, and the meanings run along deeper grooves than seen during my many visits. The project is called “Land Division” and its 120mm film negatives fill binders a ha‘ilima long. I have given myself the second ho‘oilo here, maybe the third, to complete it. These photographs look at systems of care in Hawai‘i in relation to the land, to community, to intimate relationships, and to the complex history of this place.
The work is informed by decolonial considerations of land relations (the systems by which land is marked) and the work of community groups to bring spaces out of ruin through shared labor and cultural practice. Photographically, the work drinks at the well of the New Topographics and inclines towards provisional encounters, actions as voices, and the genres of portraiture, architecture, and archival investigations. This tapestry of experiences of care also led to a B&W 16mm film (transferred to video), “Stories Are Our Maps”, 2023, considered a companion piece to these photos. The photographs in this series date between 2016 and 2022, primarily in 2021-22.