As the last days of sugar growing and milling grow closer at Lihu’e Plantation and Kekaha Sugar Co., Honolulu-based photographer Franco Salmoiraghi is traveling to Kaua’i to shoot photos of the demise. He’s also employing his medium-format camera to capture
As the last days of sugar growing and milling grow closer at Lihu’e Plantation
and Kekaha Sugar Co., Honolulu-based photographer Franco Salmoiraghi is
traveling to Kaua’i to shoot photos of the demise.
He’s also employing his
medium-format camera to capture images of the sugar mill and field work at Gay
& Robinson Sugar Co., though the company is still operating with no plans
to shut down.
The photographer recently toured the sugar mill at Kaumakani
and went into Gay & Robinson’s fields with Christine Faye as a guide. Faye
is the director of G&R’s Kaua’i Sugar Tour operation, one of the few tours
in the world that allows visitors to see firsthand the workings of an operating
sugar plantation.
Salmoiraghi said he sees the end of sugar in Hawai’i as
the final days of the industrial age in the Hawaiian Islands, an era that
arguably began in 1835 with the launching of Ladd & Co.’s sugar growing and
milling at Koloa Plantation.
His forays on Kaua’i are the most recent
chapter in an ongoing photographic series he hopes to turn into a book on the
last days of Hawai’i’s sugar plantations.
Salmoiraghi is well-known in
Hawai’i for his black and white photography and a photographic style
reminiscent of the work of famed photographers Ansel Adams and Brett
Weston.
Salmoiraghi’s portfolio already contains documentary photographs of
the closing of other sugar plantations in Hawai’i, including the one at Pahala
in Ka’u on the south tip of the Big Island, and of Waialua Sugar Co. on the
north shore of O’ahu.
An up-close film documentary that includes his
involvement in photographing the workers at Pahala during the plantation’s last
days was featured in the 1996 Hawai’i Public Television special “Ka’u Sugar: A
Town Remembers.”
The current issue of the O’ahu-based literary magazine
Bamboo Ridge presents images Salmoiraghi captured 30 years ago at Waialua Sugar
on O’ahu. In it, Salmoiraghi focuses on the lives of three women at Waialua,
with documentary photographs of the trio then and today.
New media
manager Chris Cook can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 222) and [
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