The Multilayered Meanings of Kapulani Landgraf’s Oeuvre

On the relationship between text and image in the work of the Native Hawaiian artist.

Artworks Courtesy of Kapulani Landgraf
Portraits by Mark Kushimi

When the artist Kapulani Landgraf was five years old, she acquired her first camera, a secondhand Kodak Hawkeye from St. Ann’s Carnival Country Store, for 25 cents. As a young child, from Pū‘ahu‘ula, Kāne‘ohe, O‘ahu, she accompanied her mother Kahulumanu Landgraf, a Department of Education resource teacher, to the photography lab at Hale ‘Iolani at Windward Community College. In high school at Kamehameha Schools Kapālama, Kapu enrolled in photography classes and worked on the yearbook, Ka Naʻi Aupuni, with Kumu Kīhei de Silva; then, as an undergraduate at WCC, she immersed herself in the world of black-and-white photography. It was the spring of 1985. Under the guidance of Mark Hamasaki, the photographer, typographer, and creative, and later his older brother, poet Richard Hamasaki, Kapu developed a nuanced and multilayered approach to her images at a time when there were very few published women photographers in Hawaiʻi and even fewer who were Native Hawaiian. 

No matter the final form, be it a single silver gelatin print, extended photographic essay, or multipart installation, Kapu, 58, remains intimately connected to process through a direct relationship with materials and histories. “Usually it comes all at once, when there is a need,” she said during a recent face-to-face at Hale Pālanakila, the humanities department at WCC, in the same office that Mark worked in during his years as an educator. “I remember being a young Hawaiian photographer and having to escort this established white American woman photographer, Linda Connor, during her photo trip to Hawaiʻi,” Kapu recalled. “I was supposed to take her to all these sacred places so that she could teach me how to make images in my own home,” she continued. “I guess in some ways because of this early experience, for me it’s always been about making work that counters the visitor photographers who come to Hawaiʻi to capture beautiful scenes.”

Kapu’s photo collages produced during the 1990s critically engage with issues of US occupation, cultural erasure, environmental degradation, and Native Hawaiian rights, to name a few. Film negatives are scratched with metal awls and compass points, gelatin silver prints with rotary tools producing distinct marks — a style emerges. When asked why she manipulates pristine negatives and prints during the production of her work Kapu responded matter of factly, “Altering negatives and prints is like altering the land, it can never be undone.”

“The Hawaiian landscape is a document of cultural history” reads a short introduction that Kapu wrote for her 1993 photo series, ʻAi Pōhaku, where she goes on to state, “Resort, military, industrial, residential, and highway development ravages our ʻāina.” A century after the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom by pro-America businessmen with the backing of the US military, Kapu began to meticulously research, rediscover, and document the significance of specific heiau on the island of Oʻahu. For one particular image, beneath the Moana Surfrider hotel in Waikīkī, its eerie beach umbrellas, and oblivious sunbathers, Kapu painstakingly scratched with the sharp point of a drafting compass a partial story of place — a kind of counter-chant — scored directly into her 4×5 film negative. Intentionally, if not ironically, her words carved into the sand are indelible: “THIS TEMPLE WAS LONG AGO DEMOLISHED, NOT A STONE BEING LEFT TO MARK THE SITE OF THE APUAKEHAU HEIAU.”

Altering negatives and prints is like altering the land, it can never be undone.

Kapulani Landgraf

One of Kapu’s earliest book projects, Nā Wahi Pana O Koʻolau Poko: Legendary Places of Koʻolau Poko, was published by the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi in association with the University of Hawaiʻi Press in 1994. Championed by Native Hawaiian scholar, poet, and political activist Dr. Haunani-Kay Trask (1949–2021), who at the time was also the founding director of Kamakakūokalani, the now out-of-print book features more than 80 black-and-white photographs of wahi pana — sacrosanct places and sites pulsating with life — on the Windward side of Oʻahu. Each photograph was in turn accompanied by a description, excerpts from preexisting English language texts translated or rendered in Hawaiian by Fred Kalani Meinecke. In the introduction to Nā Wahi Pana O Koʻolau Poko, Haunani-Kay Trask writes, “I was determined to have it as the inaugural volume in the Hawaiian Studies publication series.” Image and text, art and scholarship, both together, this would become a defining characteristic of Kapu’s work in the years that followed. 

Nearly a decade later, in 2003, Kapu released Nā Wahi Kapu o Maui, which reshaped the approach and format of her earlier publications. Nā Wahi Kapu o Maui was designed with black-and-white photographs of Maui’s sacred places on the right page and Kapu’s original poems written specifically for these same locations on the left page, ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi above and English below. Kapu’s texts and images demand patience and reverence of their reader. One of her most extraordinary projects, it is also one of her least engaged. In an attempt to change this, in 2025, Kapu will present a selection of her photographs and poems from Nā Wahi Kapu o Maui in the United Arab Emirates as a participating artist in the Sharjah Biennial 16. Exhibiting these works more than 8,500 miles away from their source, documentation of Maui’s resilient land, sea, and sky will be given an international platform even as rampant construction plans continue to threaten the island’s sacred places, specifically, the U.S. Air Force’s recent announcement of its intention to build additional telescopes on the slopes of Haleakalā.

Founded in 1989, Piliāmoʻo is the collective name for Mark and Kapu’s shared practice. Rooted in the particularities of place, the two have collaboratively documented transformations across the ahupuaʻa of Koʻolaupoko on the island of Oʻahu, including the water struggle of Waiāhole, the construction of Interstate H-3 in Kāneʻohe, and the modernization of Kailua. 

Consciously employing and subverting the formal language of early twentieth-century American landscape photography and land-surveying traditions, Piliāmoʻo replaces sublime landscapes and mapped territories with their emotional responses to scenes of devastation—mountains of poured rubble. Ē Luku Wale Ē (2015), published by ʻAi Pōhaku Press, arguably Piliāmoʻo’s most important effort, contrasts stereotyped assumptions of photographic depictions of Hawaiʻi’s rural valleys — paradisiacal, serene, and untouched — all the while mourning what has been lost forever in the name of progress. A verse from the book’s kanikau, or lamentation chant, composed by Kapu, expresses Piliāmoʻo’s grief:

In the early 2000s, Kapu’s work began to evoke the color red, carrying with it additional layers of cultural, political, and spiritual significance. “Red is koko. Red is revolutionary,” Kapu explained. “Red is a vital part of our Kūʻē aesthetics.” In a seven-panel piece from 2014, made for an exhibition curated by brothers Hamasaki celebrating the life and legacy of late poet Wayne Kaumualii Westlake, Kapu takes inspiration from the poem, “washing windows,” published posthumously as part of the collection “Down on the Sidewalk in Waikiki (1972–73)” included in Westlake Poems by Wayne Kaumualii Westlake (1947–1984). The normally silver-colored āholehole used as offerings to the gods are now stained red and staked to the surfaces of glass, steel, and concrete. Below the towering skyscrapers with no end in sight lay a sea of tourists completely disconnected from the reality of living in Hawaiʻi.

Kapu was introduced to Westlake’s work along with other Native Hawaiian poets like Haunani-Kay Trask, Dana Naone Hall, ʻĪmaikalani Kalāhele, and Joe Balaz in 1987 while enrolled in a course now titled Ethnic Literature of Hawaiʻi at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Going forward poetry would play an important role in Kapu’s practice. 

Working primarily with photography and poetry across the 1990s, during the early 2000s Kapu began to move into the realm of installation art. Her contribution to Nā Maka Hou: New Visions – Contemporary Native Hawaiian Art (2001), the first and last large-scale group exhibition of Native Hawaiian art to be presented by the Honolulu Museum of Art, was a life-size figure, reminiscent of kiʻi and kāʻai, formed of photographs and poems on paper bound in pulled kapa, standing atop a bed of dark cinder, surrounded — if not menacingly guarded — by glistening, razor sharp ulua fishing hooks suspended from above. Kapu titled the installation Make I Ke Kai Hohonu (2000). In lieu of an artist statement she provided audiences with a poem, “For He Who Wears the Sea like a Malo,” written by Richard, in memory of his friend and mentor Wayne Kaumualii Westlake.

Kapu’s most recent exhibition, which was on view through September 2024 at the Honolulu Museum of Art, is an updated configuration of her monumental photo installation, ʻAuʻa originally presented as part of the Honolulu Biennial 2019: To Make Wrong / Right / Now curated by scholar of contemporary Pacific art Nina Tonga. The work consists of photographic portraits of 108 Kānaka ʻŌiwi community leaders willing to be adorned publicly with a declaration of loyalty: Ten words repeated across their faces, in repetition, a concrete poem manifesting and articulating solidarity and resistance beginning with “we” and resonating line after line: “WE ARE NOT AMERICAN HE HAWAII AU MAU A MAU.”

ʻAuʻa is a reverberation of Haunani-Kay Trask’s passionate and now historic speech delivered to thousands gathered on the grounds of ‘Iolani Palace during the 1993 centennial observances of the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. “We are not American,” was her refrain, a fearless assertion in opposition to ongoing U.S. occupation and in steadfast support of Native Hawaiian self-determination. In acknowledgement of Hawaiʻi’s stalwart ʻŌiwi leaders, Kapu’s work unites different families, generations, and islands, alongside one another, forming a great shoal of ʻauʻa — reminding the lāhui to hold fast and refuse to be caught.

When we think of ʻŌiwi leaders, those who have made a difference in our lives, it is often the wāhine — sisters, aunties, nieces, mothers, daughters, grandmothers, and so on — that come to mind. One of Kapu’s most cherished pieces is a tribute to her late mother, Kahulumanu (1937–2009). To mourn and honor her passing, Kapu made an ʻahu ʻula. In lieu of feathers she fashioned her cloak from photographs — printed, cut out, threaded, and knotted together.

“When you wear an ʻahu ʻula, physically and metaphorically, you surround yourself with your ancestors. For me at that time it was my mom,” Kapu shared. “I had Mark photograph my eyes (both right and left). Then I selected a photograph of my mom, printed multiples of my eyes and of my mom on fiber paper, and dry-mounted them together (my eyes on front, my mom on back).” Surrounding every one of Kapu’s eyes are the words of a kanikau she wrote for her mother, reduplicated and intensified. Because the work is backed and framed, only the artist’s eyes are visible to viewers. Out of sight, her mother’s likeness remains protected behind Kapu’s own eyes. The multilayered meanings of Kapulani Landgraf’s texts and images are not for everyone. And like Hawaiʻi nei, they shouldn’t be.

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authors’ statement of relationality

Drew Broderick: As a young teenager with authority issues I enrolled in Kapulani Landgraf’s class, Introduction to Black and White Photography, at Windward Community College at the insistence of my mother, Maile Meyer. Through my mom, I met Kapu, through Kapu, Mark, and through Mark, Richard. Twenty years later, I continue to collaborate closely with the four of them. Most recently, the five of us had the opportunity to work together on the Hawai‘i Triennial 2022: Pacific Century – E Ho‘omau no Moananuiākea.

Richard Hamasaki: My brother, photographer Mark Hamasaki, introduced me to Kapulani Landgraf in the mid-1980s. We’ve been friends since and have collaborated on a number of projects over the years. After nearly 40 years — we three live only a few minutes from one another — there’s much trust and many mutual friendships, both living and not living. It’s exciting that Kapu has returned to Windward Community College as a tenured professor, photography teacher, and Gallery ‘Iolani curator. Her students, colleagues, and our community at large are incredibly fortunate to have such a dedicated artist, educator, and kia‘i aloha ‘āina at WCC where she first set foot on campus with her Kodak camera accompanied by her artist mother Kahulumanu when Kapu was only 5-years-old.