(Not) Shooting Hawaii

As my attentive fans perhaps recall, my family and I were in Hawaii on vacation. Naturally, I had a camera with, and shot a bunch of pictures of my children, my beautiful wife, and other relatives. In a variety of scenic settings, and so on.

Naturally, also, I tried to internalize Hawaii and figure out something "serious" to shoot. Since I am on the record that a handful of days in a new place isn't enough, it's entirely possible that my near-inability to do anything very satisfying is merely a self-fulfilling prophecy. Still, all I can do is report what happened to me, from my point of view.

I could have shot a bunch of postcards (and I did shoot a few). I could have shot some arty pictures of coconuts (I did that too). I could have sought out more of the native people and shot them (not so much here, it was a holiday, after all). I could have shot the wild excess of tourism (I did a little).

See?

But none of that is what I wanted to do. What I want, always, is to reveal something of my own view. Before I can do that I need to have a point of view. You could argue that if I hadn't been on vacation but instead had a full week to shoot I'd perhaps have made something, but I am dubious. My method involves a lot of sitting around doing nothing, and I did plenty of that, and I did indeed wrestle with Hawaii and how I feel about it.

The trouble is, it's complicated. Not, I think, any more complex than Tulane or Chicago or New Zealand or Antarctica. But, complex.

Hawaii is one of the last places on earth to be settled by humans. Something like 800 years after the birth of Christ, in our modern accounting, people rolled in. Polynesians, who possibly knew there was something way up and out there, but that it was far off, eventually made the voyage. It's possible that the coconut arrived before them, coconuts being incredibly good at ocean voyaging, These people brought other stuff, taro and probably some animals. It doesn't much matter. They showed up, the islands felt their footprints for 1000 years, and then the Euros showed up and, as they were wont in those corrupt days, screwed up everything. Sandwich Islanders got recruited, one way or another, to work the Euro's sailing ships. The diaspora was on, and colonization was too.

USA has interests, military bases are built, WWII happens, then statehood. Sugar cane happens somewhere in there. Tourism is now a huge deal.

There are layers and layers of residents, wave after wave of colonizers. The history is dense and fraught, there's a lot of animosity, and a lot of Aloha, as well.

There is the constructed view of Hawaii, Aloha and all that. It probably has deep roots, but a great deal of it is an invention of the tourist industry.

Combing all this out is probably impossible. If you shoot the postcards, you're just replicating the tourist myth. If you shoot the natives, you've just a half-assed National Geo wannabee. And so on. There's more to it.

Visually? Hawaii is a maze of visuals. There's a lot of America: strip malls, Safeway stores, condominium towers, hotels, airports. There's a healthy dose of the Caribbean, complete with Jamaican dudes. There's a little California in the run-down ranch houses with the low walled yards with dirt and palm trees. The hills and mountains don't look like anythng else that I've seen, though. Green and lush to windward, dry and barren to the lee. Unmistakeably volcanos, but aggressively eroded by the constant rain and surrounded by the sea. The Pacific Ocean, always present in Hawaii, always near, and not quite like any other oceans. The resorts, entirely false enclaves capturing a myth of the tropics, a sort of dream of Colonial Europe, complete with short brown people serving you obsessively at every turn, and fantastically expensive.

(A side note, SAP was having their annual boondoggle for their top sales people at the Grand Wailea, when my wife and I went there for dinner. This place starts around $800/night for a room, and it's really far from everything. This is designed to contain and entertain wealthy white people. There are multiple swim-up bars, connected by waterslides. One imagines that as you get drunker you get flushed down to lower and lower bars and then, finally, comatose, out to sea. Speechifying SAP executives, hilariously, made these two announcements in my hearing: "We have taken over the island of Maui!" apparently conflating this sort of freakish Disneyland with the entire island and "Unleash your indomitable will!" which my wife astutely points out is actually something we would prefer a bunch of Germans explicitly not do if that's OK. And all this is also Hawaii, isn't it?)

So, there's a lot going on here. As an Artist of some sort, at least aspirationally, it's my job to comment, to remark, not to simply give you a jumble of pictures. Even if the pictures are "the good ones" it's no good unless they pull together to say something about something. A critic cannot simply recite the plot of the movie, or worse, the plot of the first act of the movie.

To make something of Hawaii I need more time to digest, time to think. It would probably be silly to try to "explain" Hawaii, so my goal should probably to select a strand of the thing and bring it out for you. Perhaps I could show how that thread connects to the other threads.

Maybe next year. I had some germs of ideas even now, but they need time to marinate and evolve.

Organizing

I just spent a little time pulling together an album of photos from our recent vacation, and fully pulled the plug on Picasa, using native Google Photos interfaces throughout. This involved photos from a handful of sources, taken at various times.

I found that, in general, the preferred method for organizing things was to let Google do it. While you can organize things into albums if you like, Google does not make it frictionless or even particularly easy. This fits in with a paradigm I've been observing for some years now, the first instance I noticed being Apple's "Library" model for iTunes, iPhoto, and so on. I found it particularly curious with iTunes, because music actually comes pre-organized, and the very first thing iTunes does when you shove an album of music into it is to throw the album structure away. It is now just a bunch of tracks which you might or might not be able to re-assemble into the original structure if you search carefully.

The paradigm that vendors want you to use is to simply shovel all your stuff into an enormous heap. Then the vendor will let you search it, and will organize it to a degree for you. Photos get sorted by whatever date the software pulls out, and optionally by faces or whatever.

This is wrong.

The function of a computer is not to store all my shit in an enormous heap. The function of a computer, the cloud, whatever, is to impose order on my data in a way that makes sense to me. No, your ideas for how that order should be imposed are probably wrong. They might be a useful approximation, but they're wrong.

Automatic organization needs to be an assistant, not the end-game. You need to have a clear notion of a "working set" of stuff I am monkeying around with. If I upload a photo now, I need to be able to find it, trivially, and organize it relative to other objects. Sorting it to Jan 1, 1970, because the date field is all 0s is not an acceptable model. I need to be able to select things and put them into boxes, temporary boxes and permanent boxes. I need to be able to put boxes inside other boxes.

Directory structures for filesystems, heirarchical structures of data, are near-perfect models of how to get it right. And we're chucking them away as fast as possible in favor of this new thing.

The reason here is that order matters. I don't want to simply share all my pictures with the world, or even with my friends. I don't want a book made out of some automatically selected thing. Order, organization, reflects my idea of how my stuff ought to look, how it ought to be presented, how it should be shared, how it should be viewed. If you make a few books, regardless of the kind of content, you will quickly learn that the content is a startlingly small part of the problem. It is the structure, the organization, that is difficult and important.

Now, I'm a weirdo. I don't simply want to create a single linear stream of every picture I take and share it with the world, and I am fairly confident that this is exactly what the Average Consumer wants to do. Which is unfortunate, and represents some sort of further dumbing down of everything.

Quite apart from the Average Consumer is a technical problem. Big searchable heaps are wonderfully scalable. If you want to store a trillion things and have multiple copies across multiple servers and disk drives and whatnot, maintaing any organizational structure other than, basically, tags attached to the things, is difficult. Google, not being in to actually solving difficult problems and being extremely in to search, loves the enormous searchable heap. Apple has just lost its way, and everyone else just follows those jokers, and here we are.

The dominant model, the big searchable pile, destroys order and prevents the creation of order.

There was a quotation running around a decade or so ago, I think attributed to Tim Berners-Less, "flat text is just never what you want" which is exactly wrong. Flat text is almost always what you want. If you can't order your thoughts into a relatively coherent linear flow with some footnotes and cross-references, then your thoughts are stupid and incoherent. Order, structure, matters, and it enrages me that we're moving at such a dizzying pace into a world in which our thoughts, our ideas, our songs, our pictures, every product of human imagination, is simply heaved into a big unstructured, more or less sort of searchable heap. Tag something wrong, and it's fucking gone. Oops. Sorry.

Monument, please take note.

Monument

You may, or may not, have seen it here first.

Check it out: Monument

And compare with everyone's favorite visionary.

I'm not saying they stole anything, although I'd be flattered. The timelines, sadly, are wrong. This is simply an idea whose time has come.

Part IV

The last few posts have been a bit scattered, especially that Part III, whatever the heck is going on there.

The themes, though, I hope are clear. Connectedness, mindfulness, being present in the environment, in the moment. Taking these ideas for ourselves, and simultaneously preserving and giving them back through the work. Preserving, transforming, and perhaps most important, renewing, facets of the old.

I'm sitting here looking across the bay at the road to Lahaina. I'm eating a biscuit, drinking coffee. I feel like Proust. The biscuit is a little sweet, a little salty. What does this have to do with pictures I might take today? Probably nothing? Maybe something? The road to Lahaina figures disproportionately large in my idea of Hawaii. It's always present in my view from here. At night the cars coming around the point create an irregular lighthouse flicker as they turn, momentarily pointing their headlights directly at us. It took me a couple days to realize what that 'lighthouse' was.

How can I photograph that? I have no more idea how to shoot it than I do how to shoot the taste of my biscuit.

The coconut also figures large here, both in reality and in my mind. The ancient Pacific cultures relied on the coconut. It's designed to spread itself across vast oceans, so it's always there when you arrive. It can sustain human life almost by itself. The Polynesians and the coconut are inextricably entangled.

How can I photograph that entanglement? I can certainly take some pictures of coconuts, but will the idea read?

If I can manage it, even a little, will I have successfully made something new but simultaneously ancient of this little slice of a culture, something which preserves, renews, and shares that worthwhile sliver of our vast human story?

Beats me. But it's ambitious as hell, isn't it?

Part III

Here is the second train of thought spun off from our ancient navigator. Inspired, a little, by the Help Portrait project, about which I may have more to say anon.

We're losing stuff. Parts of our story are being lost. This has been going on since stories were there to lose, of course. As soon as you have two human cultures it will occur to at least one of them that they other could be subsumed and destroyed.

Things like science, large scale economies, and conveniently distant Gods lend themselves to the tools and methods which make destroying other cultures easier. All the happy savages who see God in every stone and thank the tree spirit every time they chop down a tree, they get subsumed at best, and often simply murdered en masse.

I do not propose that these cultures ought to be preserved in amber, either in photographs or on reservations (although the former is harmless and often historically useful). Cultures do and ought to evolve, to merge and fragment.

In fact, I have no particular program.

What I do propose is that as artists these cultures have ideas and themes to offer. In turn, perhaps our borrowings keep a little of what would otherwise be lost.

Be respectful, of course, but be fearless. Don't let some jerkoff tell you that you can't do that because appropriation. Don't fall into the easy traps of mockery or of bland documentation.

The program is specifically of appropriation and integration. This is how cultures evolve, each borrows the best from the neighbor, the antecedent, the conquered.

Get to borrowin'!

Part II

So where do we go now? I have two unrelated trains of thought. This is the first.

We have our ancient navigator. I'm going to make up some things that have the right kind of shape. So, please don't get fussy about the details. Our guy makes a voyage, using his people's intimate knowledge of and relationship with the sea and the sky. The voyage becomes a celebration, it becomes a song, it becomes his name. In part because it was hard and heroic, but in part because it was a natural extension of his people's culture.

We have the woman driving the destroyer. Her voyage becomes a line in the newspaper. There is no song, there is no name. There probably is a party, a feast of sorts.

The first produces a trail of cultural artifacts that echo through generations. The second does not.

If we wish to create cultural artifacts that echo down through generations, that is, Art of some weight, from which navigator ought we best draw our lessons?

More generally, the methods and patterns of these indigenous cultures seem useful and worthy of our consideration. If we follow the methods of the pundits, the well known authors of fat guides to our cameras and How To Shoot Nudes we will see no connection between the way we cook our dinner and how we make our pictures.

To the Lummi, to the Buddhist, to the Polynesian navigator (I extrapolate and guess, here) it is inconceivable that these two should be separate. To us, the Euro or Euro-influenced technophile, there simply is no connection.

Next time you navigate a canoe across an ocean, or cook a meal, consider how this is connected to the Art you have made and wish to make.

The switchboard through which any connection between your dinner and your Art occurs can only be yourself. The question is whether you permit the relationship to flow. I have no guidance for what that looks like, feels like, to you. I do believe that if you find that path, it can only be for the good.

I don't have the answers even for myself, it seems likely that my answers, should I ever find them, would not serve you anyways. Perhaps it's the search that matters?

I'll let you know if I find out.

Part I of... Something

I am at the moment in Hawaii, on holiday. On these things one has the chance now and then to learn a little about the indigenous cultures in 30 minute slices suitable for white people. So I learned a few things, and put them together with a few things I know, and here I am.

This is true: by being attentive to the size and character of ocean waves, and their direction relative to the wind, you can deduce an enormous amount about weather conditions in your area of the ocean, say, the million square miles around you. If you know the approximate date and make a rough estimate of the height of the sun throughout the midday, you can know your latitude fairly accurately. And so on. Bernard Moitessier, who employed a curious mixture of ancient and modern navigational technique, writes about this in The Long Way.

I have no idea what kind of model of the world the ancient Polynesian navigators used. I do know that they integrated close, continuous observation of the ocean, the sky, and the environment, and as a result pretty much knew where they were and what was likely to happen. They more or less routinely sailed absurdly tiny boats over thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean (which spends quite a lot of energy trying to kill boats) and got, generally, to the places they intended to reach. It wasn't safe, but it's still not safe with all our GPS and weather satellites and whatnot.

Consider a young woman on the bridge of a USN destroyer. She navigates with a variety of electronic instruments, but has no detailed notion of the character of the waves. They're 100 feet or more from where she's working, and they don't matter much to her navigational labors. She too can bring her ship home to Hawaii as a matter of routine.

The modern navigator uses a basket of specialized skills, none of which are particularly connected to the life and culture of her people. The ancient navigator used a basket of specialized skills that were an outgrowth of the total knowledge of his people's culture. Knowledge of the sea, the weather, the environment, was intimately tied to the daily life of his people, the way the got their food, how and what they worshipped, and so on.

The destroyer's voyage exists in a bubble, utterly separate and usually secret from the people. The Polynesian's voyage on the same path is literally woven from, and then back in to, the life and history of his people. His voyage has cultural weight and meaning.

Arguably, the bridge officer and the Polynesian are equally ignorant. Neither has the slightest conception of the other's world view and methods. While the bridge officer's world view is more accurate in a modern scientific sense, it serves her not particularly better than the ancient's served him, and in important ways it serves her less well.

There are similar stories to be told about much of the knowledge of indigenous peoples. No, they were not mysterious supermen with magic. There were just people, with world views laughably wrong by modern standards. Their ideas do not stand up to modern scientific methods. And yet, these ideas served then pretty well. Not well enough to allow them to exploit or destroy whichever invaders ultimately exploited or destroyed them, but well enough to live for thousands of years, sometimes, without completely screwing up their corner of the world. That's something we're having a spot of difficulty with, even with all our wonderfully accurate knowledge of everything.

There's a couple trains of thought that lead out from here and bring us back around to photography. Stay tuned.