Lahaina, HI, 9 August 2023. The dark mass behind the burned white government building is a single banyen tree, planted in 1873, the subject of an unfinished composite picture I've been working on since 2012.

Breaking character for a moment to tell a longer story.  Visited Lahaina in 2012 & soon learned that a vacation meant for "working on a relationship" was maybe not the best time to start making a 40" x 60" multiple-exposure print with extreme lighting contrasts & 12+ figures (+ birds, etc.), most of whom changed from day to day.

Returned to Vancouver. Relationship changed. Never stopped thinking of that block-size tree; the vendors & tourists & hustling locals & officials out on break from the government office & birds & other living things gathered in its shade.  & also of Ursula Le Guin's "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow": "a brooding calm that was half aware of them and half indifferent to them." 

I thought, I'm gonna make that picture! & had Duchamp's Philadelphia door, made silently over the years where he pretended to make no art, as a model.

So I bought a new camera, and a computer capable of the complex compositing.  & twice, since 2012,  flew secretly to Maui on points, never telling anyone where I was going & never staying longer than two or three days at a time, living in my rental car or stealth camping, so I could spend 12+ hours at a stretch with my camera(s) and the tree & its ever changing cast of extras.

That picture will not be finished now.  I hope the tree (which I have spent enough time with now to feel it must be dimly aware of me) & the broader society around it, which is of course my picture's real subject, survive the anthropocene, and that I will be able to visit again, when it is safe and respectful for a non-Hawaiian to do so, & that there will at some point be a new, & different picture, of which I'll say no more, until it's finished.

In the meantime: Hawaii can use your money.  If you are a reader or friend of this blog, or my work, please consider donating to support indigenous Hawaiians in their struggle(s) against the anthropocene. I have!
- posted by cjb @ 12:58 PM