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?
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…