Spectrum Hawaii; Maui the Demi-God by Steven Goldsberry, Sculpture: Material Transformed, and Okinawa: A Courteous Culture ; Koreans in Hawaii and Van Deren Coke on Photography

The following program is a production of K.H.E.T. in Honolulu Hawaii public Television. The following program is made possible by grants from the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and Chevron USA in Hawaii. [music] [music] Today on spectrum. We'll visit with an author who speaks of mamoy as a hero rather than an island. We'll explore three different materials being used for sculpture in Hawaii today. Also we'll discover the gracious manners of a courteous culture and Okinawan costume. Music,

and dance. On the windward side of a wall lives an author who have been researching. And writing. Many myths and tales of ancient part in asia. History were once told in chance. The chance and endured to the twentieth century. where they have been recorded and translated by anthropologists. Their findings have informed the imagination of Steven" cohlesberry" compose a novel about the DemiGod Maui. Occasionally there is a critical moment. When an author realizes, that he has found his story. I've never had a choice. Something grabbed me. From the moment I saw. That picture of Maui. From the moment I first began reading the stories, I was held. With "cohlesberry" they began when he noticed

land and sky. There was another line that represented the Earth, and struggling between these two huge curves was a very tiny figure of a man, lifting. And the title was "Maui lifts the sky" and that was the first, that was the first time I'd ever heard of. A maui. So I began researching. I went to the library and I worked. Read all the stories and I thought this must be. This must be the great Polynesian tale, this must be the great story of the Hawaiian Islands. Maui the demigod, however, is a story shared by many islands. Maui was, was pan-Pacific. We find tales of Maui for many of the island groups to the south. And when I was working with the book I Want the most dramatic tale, and I wanted to balance that tale with another tale that maybe wasn't a Maui a tale but was like a Maui tale. So I pulled in a couple of tricks

stories from Tahiti, for example, and incorporated them into the text and made them. Maui's stories. The tales became fiercely localized. There are, there were storytellers and chanters who claim that Maui lived on Kauai, that live on Maui, that he lived on the Big Island, that he lived in New Zealand. An author's first novel usually requires more time to compose than is expected. I was naive enough at the time to think that this would be easy. I've got the seven great feats of Maui laid out, the basic plot outline, and all I need to do is simply flesh out these tales. And it took me eight years of researching and writing to do that. "um" What kept me going I think was. My "ah" my wife in lot of ways, who is part Hawaiian. You never know how long a project's

going to take. When it starts out you think that it's gonna be "um". You had everything planned out and all the note cards are tacked on the wall. And everything is set. And what 's even building the shed. He Said something that I've quoted often. And it was "um" When he first start building the shed he said that he.. It would only take one good weekend to finish the shed. A month and a half late, it was still being done. And that's sort of how the book went. Well, the book is dedicated to my wife and I thought about her a lot when I wrote it. I wondered what she would like, what she would dislike, what her reaction would be. I told her the story as I wrote, I read to her. I handed her pages of the manuscript, she typed. She was a thoroughgoing partner on the project. And I think the thing I learned most about. "um" About working

With an author on a project, is that It's not like an 8 to 5 job where you can sit down and do the work You know turn it off and leave the office. It's... Need lot of time to just sit and stare. And It's hard for me to "um" It was hard for me at the very beginning because I thought that when you went in when Steven went into the shed it was, the writing process started and then it ended at a certain time and then I could have dinner 5:30pm and everything would be regimented and it's just not how it happens. Sometimes he have to take a break and go out and surf. Just to collect his thoughts and it took me a long time to realize that the creative process involved "um" that sort of recreation. When he heard the eel plunge in, he kicked out the bottom stones and broke the dam and the water poured out the current, starting to pull Maui with it. But he clung to the stones inside the wall,

held tight and the black flux of water. He saw the Eel's body being pulled through the opening. He thrust his dagger into the side of the eel. As it passed and he cut it open from gills to tail vent... You delight first First he went strike. After you entertain the reader then you can teach him and I hope that Maui is an example of that rule. His work habits flourish best and understood solitude. Goes very constructed this shed such purpose. I like to go to the shed and close everything down and just be alone for a while. It is here that Goldsberry is allowed moments of peace. A time when he might think deeply of Polynesian myth. He explains the story of "Wachira and papa". A Hawaiian myth that enhances Maui's fame. By offering a sensual answer to a

universal mystery. The sky was descending to make love to the earth. [Inaudible] hail was bringing his awesome weight down onto the body of Papa, which is the earth, and all of the people who lived on the Earth were scared when they could see the sky coming down. They realized that pretty soon they would be crushed between these two great bodies. And what Maui did was he went and climbed the highest mountain on the island, which was in this rendering [Inaudible] on Maui. I mean I don't know how maui pushed the sky got away from the earth [Inaudible]. The reason the heavens stay so far away from the earth now is because "um" [Inaudible] thinks that he's been forever rejected by papa. Maui himself, however cherished a peculiar ambition. He wanted to reach so much farther than anybody else have ever reach. He wanted

to conquer death. When a writer dares to penetrate into the insoluble questions, he discovers themes of magnitude. The best books that I have read, that have moved me most when I was reading them, that have changed me as I read them, are books of madness and books of death. Because these are, these are the great questions. These are the great wonderments that Man entertains. [Host] Deep questions invariably involve feelings. Sculptors bring their feelings to material, where they work out their sculpture with their hands. Have you ever noticed how certain types of sculpture seem inevitable? Sometimes there is a rightness about their placement. Elegant skin divers floating in a blue water sky.

An aquatic suggestion from Sea Life Park. Or an owl sitting in judgment in front of the mirrors of illusion at Admiral Thomas Towers. Black copper assumes the smooth hollow-air form of a sculptor's feelings. Can an artist's feelings be portrayed in solid material? Let's pick three materials being sculpted in Hawaii today and try to find out. There is stone, quarried, drawn raw from the earth, to return to earth in new ways. Copper, also from the earth, mined raw from deep beneath the surface, then made into a metal that is welcome in the sculptor's workshop. Finally, plastic, a synthetic creation of man that begins as a liquid which may slowly harden into the sculptor's wish.

Each of these materials has its own challenge and demands. Yet none of these materials were the artist's first choice. Michael Tom explains. [Tom] I tried various metals but I've always found copper to be the one that, you know, really speaks. I mean, it's -- it has a beautiful color, from browns to blues. I chose black because that's, I like that the most, but, you know, it's malleable, it forgives when you, you know, when you hit it. [Host] An artist is guided by his feelings. Chuck Watson began in metal but found stone to be more intimate. [Watson] It's a much more satisfactory feeling to work in stone than it is to work in metal. It's hard to explain but there's a warmth to stone, there's a feeling of closeness to it,

it's a natural substance where steel, of course, is a fabricated material. Stone is part of the world, part of what we live with, and part of what we are. [Host] This soaring flock of birds emerged from a can of epoxy glue, together with various powders and fiberglass cloth. Experienced in clay, sculptor Ken Shutt sought a material with clay-like consistency but higher strength and lighter weight. [Shutt] The most successful material that I came upon was epoxy resin. I can't think of another material that this could be built in just this way. Other materials, to get strong enough, get much too heavy. I've chosen epoxy because it's very, very strong for its weight. And I can cantilever shapes out. [Host] During the process of creation, a sculptor often works from a model. But not always. Michael Tom occasionally uses models,

but not when his approach is intuitive. [Tom] To begin a project I usually draw it out or, as far as the techniques, it's fairly intuitive. [Host] Chuck Watson always works from a model. Stone is unforgiving, however. If a mistake is made, stone will not bend to accommodate it. Therefore, Watson proceeds with a determination to conquer the stone. If his model is an owl, then there is an owl inside the stone. [Watson] I can see the owl that I want to come out of that stone and I'm going to make it come out of that stone. [Host] Before Ken Shutt composes his epoxy plastic sculpture, he tries out ideas on various models. It is in the model where changes might be made. An alteration might suggest itself, an experiment encouraged. When the model

is complete, this sculptor will then repeat it in larger scale. [Shutt] So essentially every step that I go through in the model construction is repeated in the full size. [Host] Ken Shutt's models contain styrofoam which are then covered with an epoxy solution. [Shutt] This is styrofoam with a fiberglass stiffener down the center. [Host] He determines the positions of his dolphin sculpture by testing and playing with the models. He also makes many drawings and enjoys watching the natural movement of marine wildlife. [Shutt] I used to spend a lot of time looking through the glass in the wader's cove at Sea Life Park. And the interplay of, of these animals, the individual shapes are interesting, and they're certainly beautiful. But the way they move together and the way they, they'll be moving together but their bodies

will be in a variety of interplay, you might say, so this is the thing that interested me in developing these sculptures. [Host] Now retired from the presidency of the Hawaiian Dredging and Construction Company, Chuck Watson wasn't always a sculptor. But his interest in art and solid three-dimensional objects began early. [Watson] And I was on my own since I was 15 years old. And I couldn't make it all the way through college during the Depression and so I started working and in spare time, and I finally wound up working full time in construction and had to give up the thing I wanted to do which was art and architecture, mostly architecture. So I picked what I thought was the closest thing to architecture, was contract building. It finally dawned on me that sculpture was the complete thing, you not only design but you construct it, so you are the architect and the contractor.

[Host] Although commonly more at home with red Swedish granite and Botticino Italian marble, Watson also tries his hand at local stone, as he did for these craters of the moon. [Watson] This is local basalt. It's a local Hawaiian rock, as a matter of fact it came from Kapa'a Quarry, right over here. This is the, this is the rock that they crush and make the concrete that makes the buildings of Hawaii. [Host] The Halekulani Hotel had a challenging commission for Watson. They wanted a Hawaiian symbol, but a very unique one. [Watson] I spent about four months at the Bishop Museum looking through all the books that I could find on Hawaiiana before a design really came to me that could be stylized and could be very modern and very clean and very beautiful and still be very Hawaiian.

[Host] Michael Tom's sculpture occasionally appears as if an event just occurred, or almost like creatures waiting patiently. He began as a painter, then he discovered jewelry. [Tom] Jewelry was fascinating. It was a time in America where all the avant-garde jewelry came out, some things you never see at Liberty Hall, sort of, I mean, body ornaments. And that was fascinating. And from there I went, I started working bigger. [Host] Tom enjoys the three-dimensional medium of metalsmithing. Larger pieces require more hammer work but there is pleasure in that. [Tom] The most pleasurable process of this metalsmithing I think is the raising. That's the only part, you see the metal really move. And you change the shape of the metal, and that I like, I enjoy that process. [Host] The process of epoxy resin sculpture

requires hours of drying. Ken Shutt's large cantilevered designs are made possible by clamps and high pressure applied at critical contact points. Support rods may be removed after the glue is set. [Shutt] Now I have it. I have a connection reinforced with fiberglass and it's up to full strength. [Host] Polyester resin is a popular material for surfboards and boat construction. But it dries too quickly to be worked by a sculptor, unlike epoxy resin, which Ken Shutt used for this private commission in a Portland, Oregon home. [Shutt] The epoxy resin dries at a very slow rate so there's a stage where it becomes kind of leather-hard, where you can -- it's not so sticky that you can move it around like clay.

And this was the thing that drew me to the epoxy. [Host] Sculpture requires painstaking skills and prodigious patience. But a sculptor uses his solid material to express his feelings. It is worth all the time and patience if the finished piece leaves an impression. Michael Tom might speak for many sculptors when he says, [Tom] I think all my work deals with feelings. I mean, no matter if it's hard edge or soft edge, it has to have that human feeling in it. That's why I like hammering. I mean, it leaves its mark on metal and sings, 'a person did it.' [Host] Leaving a manmade mark is brightly evident in Okinawan textiles. Traditional costumes combine with music and dance to reveal the ancient legacy of Okinawan culture here in Hawaii. Dance and music instructor Bonnie Miyashiro and Okinawan historian

Dr. Sakihara join Spectrum for a look at the customs of Japan's southernmost people. [Grace Zukeran] The Okinawan people are very happy people that they bring out themselves, all of their emotions into their dances. And most of them are the happy dances, and, you know, I mean, love, and like the Americans. [Mitsugu Sakihara] Women wear very colorful kimono and that design and color are very different from Japanese. Japanese tend to use subdued colors. Okinawans tend to use very bright colors. They say that it is influenced by the South Seas culture, Malaya or Indonesia. [Bonnie Miyashiro] It seems as though Okinawans are, have always been lovers of

music. Classical court dances were reserved for men. Women were not allowed to perform, just as in the Noh or the Kabuki. After World War Two, then it became more acceptable for women to perform. [Sakihara] Classical music was more or less created during the early 18th century to fill the need to entertain the Chinese ambassadors. Classical music before the court was done, performed by the gentry, members of gentle class. In that sense, it is a little different from Japan, where the musicians, performers, dancers were looked down upon and they were, of course, were not much better than the prostitutes during the Edo period. Today

of course they're way up there. But they, during the Edo period, they were no more than, very much like, uh, Untouchables. But in Okinawa because a need to entertain Chinese ambassadors, they were rigorously trained, they were governmental officials and members of gentry, young people, and so they enhanced the class. They were respected. Okinawan people are the best representative of the Southern strain of Japanese people. Okinawa represents Japan's connection, Japan's link with Melanesia. In that sense, we do have something in common with Hawaii because Hawaiian people, Polynesians, who came, originally came from Melanesia, Southeast Asia, and Japanese people, of which Okinawans are part, did start, originated in Southeast Asia, Melanesia, a long time ago. Maybe several thousand years ago.

Sometimes people do say to me that 'I've been to Java and I listen to their music, it sounds very much like Okinawan music'. Perhaps because Okinawa is politically marginal to Japan, that we are very conscious of our own position in the Japanese culture. Okinawa is about one-seventh the size of Hawaii, population is in fact about seven times as much as Hawaii. Japan, we usually say that it's a homogeneous country. All Japan, all, we understand each other, but Okinawa is an exception. Sometimes in this history, Okinawa is part of Japan, sometimes it is not. I will say that the, throughout this history, whenever there is a strong central government in Japan, when there was no central power in

Japan so political power disintegrates, then Okinawa is sure to be independent. Various centuries, that happened in 1945 when Japan lost the war, Americans took over Okinawa. Right? When the Japan became stronger again in 1972, Okinawa went back to Japan. That process has been repeated over and over again throughout the history. Okinawa is economically most backward prefecture in all Japan and yet culturally, because of its ties with China and other areas outside Japan, Okinawa is culturally very rich. If we compare Okinawa to other prefectures about same size, we do have many, many more books and many people studying about Okinawan culture, histories, than any others. One thing that you notice about Okinawan culture is the predominant influence of Chinese culture on

Okinawa. You have a picture of King of Okinawa dressed in his official costume, which is Chinese. He wears the crown which was bestowed on him by the Chinese emperor for about five centuries. Okinawa was a tributary state to China because China, court of China, court of Peking, was the center of the universe at the time. Okinawa, it was used to be on Japan's route to China in the ancient times. Anything new, important to Japan, always came from the west and south, west from China and the south from Portuguese. As a gateway of Japan towards south and west, for that reason it is unique in the history of Japan. Quite different from others. In the

pre-modern days, in the Ryukyu Kingdom days, the top owner, the ambition of man or anyone, was to obtain government post, become official. Now, then, to become official, you had to pass the civil service exam, which was very difficult. So you had to study ten years, 15 years when you were young. So all this time, self-study, who would support you? Your wife. It was quite popular for the women of Naha, you are not worthy of your name of woman of Naha if you cannot support one or two men. After I came to Hawaii, I also see the women of, Okinawa women in the community here. Also the women is, they work very hard. Okinawa men are afraid of the women. Women are like tigers. [music]

[Voiceover] The preceding program has been made possible by grants from Chevron USA in Hawaii and the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. [pause]

The following program is a production of KHET in Honolulu, Hawaii

Public Television. The following program has been funded in part by the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and a grant from the people of Chevron in Hawaii. [Host] Today on Spectrum, a noted curator guides us through the evolution of photography as an art medium. Now we venture into a culture that has given Hawaii beautiful architecture, music, and dance. The land of morning calm: Korea. Pearl Buck once called it a gem of a country inhabited by noble people. The setting for

this gem is a peninsula of rugged mountains surrounded by China, Russia, and Japan. For centuries Korea has been considered a conduit for religious thought, cultural developments, and even invading armies. [Yong-Ho Choe] Koreans, of course, during the course of history, have received a great deal of influence from China in many sectors. And of course Korea was willing to accept when they suited to the Korean traditions and their native culture. And rejected those that they are not suited to them. And also another very important role that Korea had played historically was to transmit the highest civilization that had existed in China to Japan, playing sort of a bridge in the cultural transmissions. [Host] Korea has chosen

well from these cultural transmissions. Their music, dance, language, and food are remarkably unique. As with other ethnic groups, the Koreans' first contact with Hawaii was in the fields of the sugar plantations. [Choe] The Hawaii Sugar Plantation Association here in Hawaii has been troubled by the labor force being monopolized by the Japanese. The Chinese had been prohibited from coming to Hawaii into the United States because of the Chinese Exclusionary Act. So the HSPT was looking for alternative labor sources and they found Korea as a convenient supplier of the labor force to Hawaii. And starting from 1903, actually the first group of Korean labor of 103

men and women arrived Honolulu Harbor on January 13, 1903. And thereafter the laborers continued to come to Hawaii until the middle part of 1905, when Korean government was forced to terminate emigration of laborers to Hawaii largely because of the pressure exerted by the Japanese government. [Host] When emigration from Korea ended in 1905, eight thousand Koreans made Hawaii home. As soon as the Koreans found the opportunity, they left the fields for the cities and small businesses. [Choe] I remember one lady who told me that after they opened the laundry shop, one thing they did was every Monday morning, whether they had the business or not, first thing they did, she did, when she opened the laundry shop, she struck down

the cash register and picked up $1 dollar and went to a bank and deposited it every week, whether she made money or not. This, the money accumulated in this way, later used to buy apartment house or to run the boarding house. [Host] Although the Korean community is among the smallest in size in Hawaii, there are beautiful examples of its cultural contributions. On the East-West Campus of Mānoa Valley sits the Center for Korean Studies. The building itself demonstrates the Koreans' love for color by using the royal tones of the Yi dynasty. The structure is patterned after a 14th century palace in Seoul. In 1974 Korean craftsmen came to Hawaii to build the building which is marked by latticework, a deep green glazed tile roof, and

beautifully painted ornamentations. Other expressions of the culture may not be as visible. But when discovered, they are found to be like no other. Music, for instance. In Korea, Mrs. Kum-Yun Sung was named a national treasure for her contributions as player and composer for the gayageum. In 1974 she moved to Hawaii with her daughter and now lives in Honolulu. [Speaking in Korean, translator Myung-Ji Au speaking English]

Usually before her generation, they just followed teacher's step. They didn't think of it to compose anything else, just carry whatever the teacher teach them and they play all their life. But her case was different and she had a talent that she want to compose her own music rather than listen to her teacher. She made her own music. [Host] She trained early, beginning at the age of seven. [Au] Somebody lived next to her. And the person played the music, that was gayageum, and she loved it. So she asked her father if she could learn that music. Because my grandfather, he loved Korean music. So she had a chance, at that time she was only seven years old. So from that time til now, she played with gayageum, just like her life. [Byong-Won Lee] Korean music is based on the triple meter, the rhythm of three, like a one-two-three

tempo or rhythm. Whereas the Japanese or Chinese musics are based on quadruple rhythm, rhythm of four. That is a really big difference. Where to the more subtle extent, the sound quality of Korean music emphasize more on the unpolished, the natural sound of the instrument and the voice. Your, like a, for the manufacturing, the musical instrument, you don't have to spend energy to polishing the instrument to produce the refined sound, because the rough sound is really a preferred tone quality of Korean music. [Host] It has been said that dance actually originated in Korea and then

migrated to China and Japan. Whether or not, the folk dances did begin with the shamanist religious ceremonies over 3000 years ago. The shaman, or priests, existed in Korea before the introduction of Buddhism and Confucianism, and still can be found in rural villages. [Byong-Won Lee] Dance might be better expressed as a form of art than music, especially instrumental music because it, the Korean traditional dance really reflects the past, the religious background and ethics of Korea. The expression is not opened, or ripened to the full. It's always restrained so that patience and restrained expression is probably the best way for expressing

the Korean dance in general. [Host] Here in Honolulu, the Korean dance can be found at the Halla Huhm Studio. Presently in Korea, Mrs. Huhm is helping her students connect with their culture. [Suk Yong Yi] They're living in Americanized society. It's easy for one to forget your background, the history of your ancestors. In my case, which is Korean also, I've been living here for 12 years. It's one way of keeping in touch and learning the society, the culture, and the discipline of Korean culture. [Valorie Hyland] My mother came from Korea and she grew up in a country where I haven't, you know, learned to grow up in and that I must miss something that she grew up in because she taught me how to grow in strict discipline, society, and in America you can't really learn that

by just going to school. So I take Korean dance to give me an understanding of what my mother has gone through when she was young. [Yeon Hi Joo] Mrs. Huhn came in 1949. When she opened the studio. Uh, she did, dance is Mrs. Huhn's second life, that much important. So many very difficult situations, but still she opened the studio, and so I really give her the credit. In Korea, first thing, we practice every day. Some days rest, but here it's just the opposite way. Once a week, so maybe we have something on the performance, hard, little bit hard, they have every day, but here is, students most times, it's good.

Just once a week dance, but it's good. [Yi] We perform a lot, especially for tourists. And when we perform for tourists that are from mainland or from Europe, I hear a lot of comments saying it was the first time they have ever seen Korean dance and how much they enjoyed it. It gives me satisfaction of, I'm showing others about, I'm sharing with them Korean culture. Something that they have never experienced before, and it gives me great satisfaction doing so. [Host] Sharing one's culture with others gives the artist enjoyment as well as pleasure to the audience. Sharing one's vision can give a different perspective to an everyday occurrence. The photographer shares his world of images through his camera. Van Deren Coke, the director of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, takes us through the evolution of photographic images in an exhibition at the Honolulu

Academy of Arts. Photography can be as commonplace as snapshots of a Fourth of July picnic or a studied treatment of a moonrise over New Mexico. Once a plaything of the wealthy hobbyist, photography is now instant and accessible to many enthusiasts. During its maturation, photography has assumed styles created by history, technical developments, and its ongoing relationship with the other arts. [Van Deren Coke] From the beginning, a lot of painters moved into photography. Photography totally destroyed the handmade miniature painting, people went for the photograph instead of the hand-created likeness. And so you had the, this increment of artistic

skill introduced to photography and it stuck with it a long time. But it was always sort of a handmaiden of the other arts. The highest praise for photographs at that time was, I didn't even know it was a photograph, it looks like a drawing or a painting. [Host] Photographers drew on the work of other artists and their styles. [Coke] Their greatest influence was Whistler. Whistler's model, in turn, was Japanese prints in many cases. So the photographers would often go to that original source, particularly the 19th century Ukiyo-e prints. And we see that quite clearly in this famous picture by Alfred Stieglitz of the Flatiron Building in New York City which has both in its overall shape and the way the tree interacts with the building recollections of Japanese printmaking techniques.

Stieglitz operated in New York City the most avant garde art gallery in America. [Host] It was at this gallery in 1915 that photographer Paul Strand met Formalist artist Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. This meeting affected the development of photography and the subsequent work of Strand. [Coke] He began in 1916 to make pictures of elements that were geometric in nature without reference to what they actually represented like the bowls here and the pear have to do with, with geometric forms, not with pears and bowls. And the relationship between these elements were seen as elements rather than representing in a documentary sense what was in front of the camera. That was a very great step toward abstraction and toward the utilization of a whole new kind of subject matter for photography.

[Host] Technological advances now have made for a smaller camera, one that could be handheld. Now the photographer is less obtrusive and more spontaneous. The snapshot is created. [Coke] Weegee's work is fairly consistent in the way he gets to the human element without sentimentality, mawkishness, or the other things that drain pictures of their lasting power. It is a great contribution. Think of pictures of people in various states of exultation or whatever the notion might be that is beyond the commonplace. Cartier-Bresson probably early realized that the portability of this camera and the fact that it had 35 exposures he could expand without reloading gave him a great flexibility of viewpoint and he would use this cheap film that he could

run through his camera to get up to a point that what he called the decisive moment, when everything came together, the idea and the form. And it's this marvelous example of a person suspended in the photograph that we all empathize with almost in a bodily sense because he has not come in down to the splash and we know he's going to, inevitably. And then in the background, the marvelous example way over in the background of a big poster that exemplified the skilled dancer also making a jump, and sort of a repetition like an echo. And that was a great breakthrough as far as attitude toward photography. It wasn't candid photography in the sense of catching something that was unsavory, it was just extending human vision because the human eye can't see all this the same time. And the camera can arrest it so we can see it later.

These kind of instantaneous recordings were snapshots, mementoes. This man, Lartigue, came from a very well-to-do family who was crazy about speed and air and various devices that were quite modern at the time and as a consequence he was more interested in catching these moments than in making any art. [Host] Photographers from the beginning have manipulated their images, changing them to capture a mood, express a feeling, combining them, all to better capture the image of their creative eye. [Coke] At the turn of the century, photographers were using many manipulated processes. Earlier they were done to actually impress people with their knowledge of the things you could do with it, the various kinds of monkeying with the print and the negative. Today it comes out of a different motivation, it comes out of trying to break out of the straightjacket of the

pure photograph. If you make a mark on a photograph, even a modest mark on a photograph, you do have this extraordinary change in the way space is understood. And since they are, the artists, photographers became very sophisticated and began to use the language of the painter space, they began to use this. Then there was this tremendous concern for other textures, actual physical things on top of the print. This picture by Bill Larson incorporates many of the things that photographers are interested in. They're interested in color. In this case he's gotten part of his color by using the old blueprint process. The image is a snapshot. He's holding onto the idea of photography in relationship to the snapshot and that's been sewn to another piece of just sheer textured material that

has a zipper in it, zipper being one kind of texture, the cloth another, tearing down another part of the edge of it. Then underneath is what looks to be, like a Polaroid picture, this great instant color process we have available to us today. And then linking that is sewn passages of the whole rainbow color, which gives you both texture and the color. And so he's got the whole need of photographers for that, for that texture and color all in one ball of wax. Color is the darling of all photographers today because it's new. There is a lot of experimentation because it is new. And there's a new dimension that has been added by just sheer color

of many, many new problems. One of the problems is the philosophic one, are we trying to emulate nature, trying to mirror nature, or are we trying to use color for its own emotional quality? I think that the person that bridges this gap as well as anybody is Joel Meyerowitz, he's a real pro, works on assignment in many cases, but he ends up with very artistic pictures. And he has an eye for things that are dramatic out of things that are rather commonplace. And he's a good example of how he works with processed color, with color that is processed in labs and printed in labs. But there's been a great need in the part of a lot of photographers to get some kind of color other than processed color because the same problems, the uninterrupted surface, the smoothness of the image, that everything is done with the eye and the lens. [Host] Hand-in-hand with the development of photography was the appearance of the pictorial magazine, a marketplace for images.

[Coke] There was a tremendous increase first in Germany, then in France and in the 30s in the United States in picture magazines. They were generally weekly. They consumed an awful lot of photographs. They wanted something that was fresh, sometimes informative, sometimes spot news, sometimes something that was rather exotic. They sent these magazines, or agencies that worked for these magazines went all over the world to do what they call photojournalism, in other words, thought pieces. Where in this case this is W. Eugene Smith, the great American photographer who was linked with Life Magazine most of his life. He's gone to Spain and gotten well acquainted with the people in the, in the little Spanish village that he was profiling, I guess you'd call it. And he stayed around and he took pictures of all the people, in this case, a woman spinning thread as it had been spun for a thousand years

to show how these people lived in the 1950s. It was a sort of a foray into a romantic and strange fascination with what was not happening in your own backyard. And these all were knitted together with text and literally picture stories, eight, ten, fifteen pictures would constitute a picture story. But this is a kind of documentary photography. But they truly aren't really documents because there's a great deal of coaching and directing going on when these pictures are made, but they are meant to seem to be caught offhand. It has a tremendous pull because of its immediate identification of things that in turn evoke other things. Because we really believe it. We still really believe the photograph with all the manipulation that

takes place, we really believe what we see in there did exist in front of that camera and then we can use that as a springboard for our own imagination. I think that's the appeal. [Host] And what has happened to the viewer, the fine arts photographer, while all this has been going on? [Coke] Well, it's created an audience, a very sophisticated audience. We have now thousands of students who have taken one, two, three, four courses in photography by people who understand what I've been saying about metaphor and understand the history of photography, understand the aspirations of photographers. And as a consequence they go out and they become accountants and they become doctors or lawyers or whatever they might do professionally. That sticks with them. There's no fear on their part to go into a photographic exhibition and exercising their judgment and saying "I like this one and here's why I like it". Or, "I don't like that one". I think this has been behind, I think that's one of the things to

fuel this photographic renaissance, if you want to call it that. And certainly this great surge of interest in photography as an art form. We've just turned out much more sophisticated image makers using the camera, because they have taken art history and they've taken photo history and they might have had some anthropology and they might have had some of these other things that give them a corpus out of which they can dip for ideas. And they're expecting other people to have this kind of background when they make their pictures. It's very difficult to make a camera do something that the human eye does very readily and the human brain combined with the human eye does without even any pause. But a camera, because it's meant to do one simple mechanical thing, we sort of think that it works like a human eye. And it can't, you cannot make it mind your mind,

because it's a very simple instrument, however complicated it might seem to be. That of course is the challenge. It's very difficult to make art with a camera. That's the, that's the crux of the matter. Very difficult indeed to really make art with a camera. [Host] The decisive moment can be a split-second reaction or the result of many years of preparation and training. The artist uses his tools. He has his camera or hands to offer us another perspective to the world in which we live and to the individual we each are. Join us again on our next Spectrum. [music] [music]

[music] Spectrum was funded in part by a grant from the people of Chevron in Hawaii and by the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts.