Richard Burkhart

Heiau

The outer islands of Hawaii became my home after leaving the Navy. First on the island of Kauai were I learned how to hunt wild pigs with knives and dogs and where I first met people who confronted life head on, like David Ochsenschlager, and John Wehrhiem. David was an ex semi-pro football player who just couldn’t live in civil society and so was carving out a small real estate empire on the north shore of the island through barter and selling very powerful marijuana, which, like many in the islands, he cultivated in the rich mountain valleys. Photography was the passionate medium of my father and I’ve always felt surrounded by photography. When I began studying art I naturally turned to the camera. John was the only person on the island of Kauai who knew what art photography was and balanced teaching photography, photographic printing, and growing bananas with equal passion. He soon advised me to go to Hilo on the `Big Island’ of Hawaii to continue studying. I spent little more than one year there, but it was, so far, the longest year of my life. I still don’t understand the expansion of time. I have thought over time that the entire island of Hawaii is a Heiau or sacred place. Walter Chappell was living there at the time, experimenting with his kirlian photographs, other photographers such as Paul Caponigro, Linda Conners, Judy Dater came variously to experience the magic spiritually around the Kiluea Iki volcano that year. I lived in an isolated cabin in a forest oasis surrounded by otherwise lunar landscape of the high ridge between the two volcanic mountains Mona Loa and Mona Kea called the “saddle”.  At times it felt as though I was the only person on the planet. A wood-burning stove, candle light, and water collected from the almost daily afternoon rains  couldn’t have suited me better.  Signs of men or society amounted to occasional bits of trash being absorbed into the mists. It was there, on that island, that I began to understand Nature as a living, conscious, sexual being . This is what most of us there couldn’t fail to connect with. That is what those who lived there before us knew.

 

 

Untitled. Photograph. 1977. Richard Burkhart.