Is a rainbow still a rainbow if it’s in black and white? Or put another way, can photographs of people, manmade structures and urban settings really be by Ansel Adams?
The answer is clearly yes, judging by the photographer’s work in “Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: The Hawaii Pictures,” on view July 18 through Jan. 12, 2014, at the Honolulu Museum of Art, and afterwards at the O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. But this first paired exhibition of island imagery by the iconic artists of the West also raises interesting questions about their artistic responses to commercial assignments, as well as to the lush scenery and diverse humanity.
“They’re kind of linked in the popular imagination — they were friends and they both spent time in the Southwest, and the O’Keeffe Museum has done a show on the both of them, but never on the two in dialogue,” curator Theresa Papanikolas explains. “What differentiates this show is that it deals very much with the sense of place. We associate O’Keeffe with New Mexico, Adams with the High Sierra and Yosemite Valley, but what happens when they go to a place that they’re not associated with, that they haven’t been to. How do they get up to speed, and does the work have the same resonance with their audiences?”
O’Keeffe had traveled to Hawaiʻi in 1939 on a commission for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now the Dole company) to create illustrations for their advertisements. During her two-month stay, she visited Oahu, Kauai, Hawaii and Maui, where her time in the company of 12-year-old Patricia Jennings in Hana became the subject of a 2011 memoir, “Georgia O’Keeffe’s Hawaii” (as reported here), as well the inspiration for scenes of lava bridges arching over rough ocean and misty green mountains threaded by silvery waterfalls. Famously, O’Keeffe did not return to the Mainland with any images of pineapples, but later placated her employers with a suitable illustration.
“O’Keeffe started in Honolulu in a social whirlwind, took tours of the islands, came to the (Honolulu art) museum, went to the Bishop Museum, went to hula performances, ate Chinese food, did all the touristy things,” Papanikolas notes. “Then she got to the point where she said she was going to shut all that out and buckle down to paint. … Adams approached it as a professional, working for what is now First Hawaiian Bank, who were publishing a commemorative volume for their centennial.”
Adams had visited the islands on commission before, in 1948, when he shot photos for a series on national parks for the Department of the Interior. But when what was then the Bishop National Bank of Hawai hired him in 1957, the expectation was that he would cast a wide eye in the Territory of Hawaii on the eve of statehood.
“They wanted something that did not look like a tourist brochure — they wanted a cross-section of what Hawaii really looked like at the time,” Papanikolas says. “So the book has pictures of techonology, radio anntennae and scientists, portraits of famous people … he consciously resisted promotional images; there’s no Diamond Head, no hula. It wasn’t supposed to be a Chamber of Commerce fluff piece.”
Adams’ 56 prints in the exhibition do include some striking landscapes, such as a ghostly stand of trees on Molokai or what appear to be roots of Moreton Bay fig trees (the ones seen cradling dinosaur eggs in “Jurassic Park”) in Honolulu’s Foster Botanical Garden. But a number of images of nature without people per se still reveal their presence, whether it’s a Buddhist cemetery on a hillside overlooking Paia, Maui (where the black-and-white rainbow appears), or a petroglyph from the Big Island, or a fishpond on Molokai.
And then there are portraits such as a family in front of their plantation home in Wailuku and a clutch of Kamehameha School boys, and scenes of work: women on a Honolulu pineapple cannery line, bank directors around their board table, Marines jumping out of a helicopter landing at Kaneohe. (See the Honolulu Star Advertiser photo gallery for additional pictures not included with this story.)
“He was at a point in his thinking about photography that he was starting to reincorporate pictures of people in his photographs,” notes Papanikolas, “thinking that you can’t really understand nature and landcscape unless you show how people coexist with it or inhabit it. And so he shows the people who inhabited Hawai’i at the time. He was intrepid and went all over the place.
“Before I came to this project, I really associated Ansel Adams with pictures of landscapes,” she admits. “It was so surprising to me to see so many picures of people, and in settings that we wouldn’t necessarily see as scenic — kids at high school, or ladies working in a cannery line, or the technology. He made them scenic, even though they’re not settings we associate immediately with being scenic.”
The Honolulu Museum of Art is open 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $10 adults, $5 ages 4 to 17, younger free; it’s free the first Wednesday of every month and also the third Sunday of the month, when it’s open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., courtesy of the Bank of Hawaii. A 116-page color catalogue for “Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: The Hawai’i Pictures” will be available in the museum shop.
Jeanne Cooper is the former Chronicle Travel Editor and author of SFGate’s Hawaii Insider, a blog about Hawaii travel and island culture.
Island imagery: Ansel Adams and Georgia O"Keeffe in Hawaii
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