Articles & Interviews

Hawaii Tribune-Herald, January 19, 2001

The Eye of Hawaii
Stunning nature images are a labor of love
for well-known photographer G. Brad Lewis

G. Brad Lewis may well be the Big Island’s best known photographer. His photos have graced the covers of national magazines such as Life, Natural History, GEO and Travel Holiday, and have illustrated articles in National Geographic, Newsweek, Omni and Stern, among others. He was singled out for an interview by Outdoor Photographer magazine; his artistic photos of flowing and fountaining lava decorate the walls of galleries and restaurants all over the Big Island.

So why do a photographic exhibition at the East Hawaii Cultural Center? “They asked me to,” he says simply.

But the exhibition, called “In Pursuit of Golden Light,” has also given Lewis a chance to show local audiences some aspects of his art that they might not have known about. Many of the images in the show are his trademark “LavArt” -- exquisite photos of Kilauea’s moments of creation -- but other photos tackle different subject matter; the intricate veins in a backlit taro leaf, for instance, or the draperies of moss on an evergreen in Washington State’s Olympic National Park. Lewis says one of the photos that drew the most favorable comment from the crowd at the exhibition’s opening was “Dawn Light,” a shot which displays the power of a massive wave on Oahu’s North Shore.

“I’ve been trying to capture an excellent wave shot for years,” Lewis says. “That was the first finger of light through the valley that morning. It caught the face of the wave.” Lewis had worked carefully to set up his camera on exactly the right place on the beach. The lens captured a 30-foot breaker almost end on, as the first rays of light from over the Ko`olau’s struck its face.

Many popular photos and paintings of waves highlight the translucency of the water by shooting the sunlight behind it. But in Lewis’ photo, the light reflecting on the onrushing wave face makes it seem almost solid: milk white and opaque as marble, an unstoppable moving wall. The cap of the wave, meanwhile, dissolves into wild spray and mist; where ocean ends and atmosphere begins is impossible to tell. The photo has frozen a moment where chaos and physics, beauty and violence become the same thing.

Lewis has made a career out of capturing such moments. In his lava photos, solid often becomes liquid, liquid becomes gas, gas becomes fire -- all in the same frame of film. In one shot, a golden-and-black dome rises from a lava lake; half the lava is already stone, and the rest a fiery molten lacework. In another photo, two narrow streams of golden lava disappear into a maelstrom of ocean and mist, while in the foreground, fingers of nearly cooled lava curl down an older lava pillow to plunge into pools that might be water, or might be mist over liquid stone. Some shots seem at first to be pure luck. In “Pele’s Heartbeat,” droplets of fiery lava spatter to form a heart-shaped pattern in mid-air. In “Pu`u O`o,” sulfur steam above the lava lake transforms the solid stone crater wall behind it into an ephemeral phantom. Pressure ridges in the stone suggest eye-brows; a rock formation below them, a nose.

Lewis admits that he hadn’t noticed the ghostly face. But this isn’t the first time humanoid apparitions have appeared in the lava forms of his photographs. “A lot of my faces were discovered by viewers,” he says.

But even the “lucky” shots represent far more than luck. Lewis applies hard work, scientific knowledge and years of experience to maximize the odds in his poker game with the volcano. “Notekula” (Hawaiian for “swan”), for instance, was named for the fiery image’s resemblance to that bird. Just as readily, its arcing “neck” suggests a solar prominence, an arch of hot plasma falling back into the sun’s fiery body. But it is also a precise record of a scientific event: the moment a bubble of hot gas bursts through molten lava’s skin. The
swan’s outspread “wings” -- actually part of the interior wall of the burst bubble, caught in the moment before it recedes into the lava again -- glow more fiery yellow than the surrounding lava. For a moment, the camera is looking into the interior of the molten rock itself. Before the bubble burst, Lewis recognized a unique opportunity. “That was a really unusual event,” he recalls. “The lava was really thick, and it didn’t allow the gas to escape like most bubble formations.”

Lewis always sets up at least two cameras at the same time, so that one camera is ready to run while he’s changing film on the other. He may have the cameras loaded with two different types of film to record different exposures. Operating amid intense heat and acid fumes, he goes through a lot of tripods, cameras and lenses.

He also has to deal with another set of odds: those of injury or death. He carries a respirator to protect his lungs from fumes and wears leather boots with sewn-on soles that won’t melt off when he walks on newly solidified lava. So far, he’s avoided a serious injury.

“I’ve got a permit from the Hawaii Volcanoes Observatory to be there,” he says. “It’s not open to everybody, but it would be a madhouse if it was. It can get pretty dangerous in there. If conditions are dangerous, I walk away.”

A different kind of luck brought Lewis to the island. But again, he managed to maximize the odds. A Utah native who studied English and psychology in college, he rejected a potential teaching career in order to pursue more exciting jobs. “I was basically just living my dreams and getting all the wilderness I could,” he recalls. Just prior to his move to the Big Island, he was working in Alaska as an archeologist, mapping ancient Chugash burial sites in order to help establish tribal land claims.

“I came here on a two-week vacation from Alaska,” he recalls. “I was on my way to do some climbing in Europe. I got here and never left.” Lewis had been taking photographs for years, building up a collection of images. In about 1986, he resolved to turn pro: “Finally I just stayed on the island until I got it done.” But it was Kilauea, he says, that “really jump-started my career.” When the Pu`u O`o eruptions began, Lewis built up a photographic portfolio of the volcano’s spectacular flows and fountains. In 1990, he sent some to Life magazine -- and was rewarded with a double-page spread. They were the first lava photos he’d ever published.

“It was a great beginning. It really got things pumping,” he says. “After that, I had magazines from all over the world calling me, which made it bigger and bigger. Other publishers would see it in some other magazine, and it would just keep going.”

But Lewis’ career isn’t just about fame, money or even adventure. “The goal of my photography is to further the viewer’s understanding and appreciation of the natural world,” he writes in his introduction to the new exhibition. “I utilize movement, light and texture of volcanic activity to open human emotions to the pulse of the Earth. I have chosen Kilauea Volcano on the island of Hawaii as my primary subject. Nowhere else on Earth is creation happening on a continual basis at such a rapid rate. I find it crucial that there exist visual reminders that the Earth is alive and fulfilling an agenda of its own.”