A Day in the Life of Hawaii (1982)

The cover of the 224 page coffee table book. Cover photo by Dan Dry, assigned my me.

A project I worked on early in my career. Thanks to Rick Smolan for inviting me and helping to jumpstart my wonderful career. So many lessons learned from both Rick and David Elliott Cohen. Made great friends and three months living in Hawai’i and exploring Maui, Moloka’i and Oahu. Now you know why my love affair with Hawai’i

From Rick Smolan:
Forty years ago a strange thing happened on the world's news fronts. In London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, El Salvador, and Beirut, in the Amazon jungle, and on the Afghanistan border, fifty of the world's foremost Photojournalists, the world-weary khaki clad lensmen asnd lenswomen of the press, packed their cameras and canvas shoulder bags and boarded planes to the middle of the Pacific ocean to take on one of the most unusual and challenging assignments of the careers: to capture the entire state of Hawaii on film in the course of a single 24 hour period.
Photojournalist, Rick Smolan, editor, David Cohen, designer Leslie Smolan and project director Jennifer Erwitt gave the photographers unusual instruction: Don’t try to make the definitive statement about Hawaii. Don’t concentrate on the rich, the famous or the powerful. Avoid clichés. instead do the hardest thing of all: make extraordinary pictures of ordinary events.
The award winning one hour PBS TV special (below), directed by Sandy Smolan, captures how the A DAY IN THE LIFE OF HAWAII Team pulled off a project that publishing 35 publishers had turned down, insisting it would never work. Click on the link below to go on assignment with members of the most illustrious photography team ever assembled. 
• Go dancing in Waikiki with top German cameraman Gerd Ludwig. 
• Join a Hulu school in progress on the island of Molokai with US newspaper photographer of the year Dan Dry, 
• Climb 14,000 feet to the summit of Mauna Kea with Time Photographer Shelly Katz, 
• Come face-to-face with the Murray eel 60 feet below the surface of the Pacific with National Geographic David Doubilet, 
• Visit the Hawaiian Cowboys of the 224,000 acre Parker Ranch with Pulitzer Prize winner Eddie Adams, 
• Ride a perfect 10 foot wave on the Bonzai pipeline with Surfing Magazine's Aaron Chang. 
The several hundred color and black-and-white pictures in A DAY IN THE LIFE OF HAWAII were chosen from almost 60,000 shot during a single day. None is 24 hours older or younger than any other and no picture was shot for any purpose other than to document the harmonies and paradoxes of life in Hawaii as it was lived on this one day. 
But even 60,000 images, barely hint of the infinite moments that passed through the beaches and hills in homes and hearts of Hawaii on that day. A DAY IN THE LIFE OF HAWAII belongs to them -- to each smile, each silence, each crashing wave, saved only in memory.
#photography #photoshoot #photojournalism