By focusing its lens on the islands’ liminal spaces, a recently formed photography collective renders the familiar into the foreign — and back again.
Images by Local & Liminal
In 2022, Harold Calventas and Atis Puampai assembled a set of local photographers to document the islands’ in-between places: desolate hotel lobbies, parking garages, and school hallways. It was a riff on the Internet trend of liminal spaces, which had gained popularity years earlier for photographs that turned the familiar into the unsettling. The collective, dubbed Local & Liminal, brings a distinctly Hawaiʻi take to the trend in ways only locals would understand, like an abandoned Manapua truck, for example, or Kahala Mall’s infamous (and allegedly haunted) mirror-lined hallway. Below is a sampling of Local & Liminal’s portfolio so far. Do you recognize any of the places?
liminal (adj.) lim·i·nal
1: of, relating to, or situated at a sensory threshold : barely perceptible or capable of eliciting a response, 2: of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition
When we started the project, we wanted to go back and revisit these spaces in a way that gave us that sense of familiarity, the universality within those spaces.
Harold Calventas, co-founder, Local & Liminal
We all had a mutual understanding that the liminal space is an aesthetic that can be explored, and we wanted to work with each other to achieve that. We would all bring up interesting questions that we couldn’t really answer. Especially with photography and art, if you can’t answer that question, it’s worth exploring.
Atis Puampai, co-founder, Local & Liminal
[Liminal spaces] lure people in because we don’t have people in here; we don’t have anything of significant interest. So what do we have to look at? What do we have left? We have the forms, shapes, lines, patterns, textures to analyze and take in.
Eric Ordorica, photographer, Local & Liminal
With our Capital Modern [exhibition], it was interesting seeing tourists stare at our pieces on the wall and be like, “What am I supposed to feel over here?” But it was for the locals, by the locals.
Harold Calventas, co-founder, Local & Liminal
My big thing was to capture these open air spaces that are under threat of being demolished and taken over with all these new land developments.
Harold Calventas, co-founder, Local & Liminal
I try to approach [my photographs] so that looks like it could be shot anywhere. But it was shot in Hawaiʻi. That’s the one, two punch. They’ll see really geometric lines. They’ll see industrial complexes — something that you don’t really associate with here. Then it’s like, “Oh, what is happening to Hawaiʻi?”
Atis Puampai, co-founder, Local & Liminal
Images by
Vincent Bercasio
Harold Calventas
Alaina Degray
Nehu Evans
Gento Fujiki
Ryan Lake
Lala Myers
Taylor Niimoto
Eric Ordorica
Atis Puampai
Camden Ramirez