Whenever I have the time or the will, I head down to Waikiki to capture the randomness of life on the beach. I’ve always wanted to be a street photographer like Garry Winogrand, Bruce Gilden, or Martin Parr but instead of the cold streets of Manhattan, I’m stuck with bad Hawaiian shirts and endless sunsets. There’s always something quirky on the beach whether its the sunburned Midwesterner in socks and sandals or a self absorbed Japanese girl with a selfie stick.
So the other day, we took a sunset stroll down Waikiki and encounter the usual oddities out and about on the beach. A tout pushing exotic birds photos onto tourists for pictures, nouveau riche Chinese obnoxiously dressed in beachwear, and families scrambling to capture themselves with the fading Hawaiian sunset. We also spotted a Japanese bride and groom dressed up in full wedding garb with their photographer taking sunset pictures.
Many Japanese tourist purchase the Hawaiian wedding fantasy by renting wedding dresses and tuxedos to pose for pictures even though they might not be married or they’ve been married for years. It is an odd sight to see but they are as common as the sunset in Hawaii. So we watch the wedding couple with little interest until my wife notices a group of young Micronesian girls sitting in the surf watching in awe at the Disney fantasy happening right in front of them. With mouths agape, the little sea urchins stare at the ivory skinned bride in her billowing white dress fawn as her tuxedo-wearing prince kneels in front of her for a picture perfect moment with the sun dripping behind the Waianae Mountains.
The photo wasn’t perfect as the kids were just a tad bit too far away and the sun was directly behind making them completely backlit. I quickly maneuvered myself around the scene trying not to catch the attention of the bride or the kids to capture the moment but technically realized it was too hard to capture. So I snapped off a few frames and moved on. Things happen so fast I when you do this type of photography that you can’t dwell on a missed opportunity.
But it wasn’t till we got home and I ran the images through Photoshop that I saw what caught my wife’s attention. I had to pull lighting the shadows shrouding the girls’s expressions and crop tight to balance out the composition but the image captures the fantasy of the little girl’s wedding scene. It isn’t one of my better images but I think it is one of my nicer beach pictures.
In a way, I captured the inequality of life in Hawaii, the life of those who can afford to spend time on the beach and those who have few options otherwise. The young girls appeared to be homeless or at the least, their families were not economically stable. They were playing in front of a larger group of Micronesian adults who were cooking and sleeping in the small pavilion facing the beach. The family also seemed to be harvesting a meal from the sea by spearfishing. Now this is not a bad thing as I would love to spearfish a meal or two every so often but it seemed that might have been the only way to make due for themselves. Many Micronesians immigrants arrive in Hawaii with little and struggle to live in paradise.
My image shows the haves and the haves nots in Hawaii yet none of that really mattered to anyone in the picture. Before they walked off the beach, the Japanese bride sweetly waved at the kids and they screamed and laugh in joy that she recognized them. They yelled “Aloha! Aloha!” and jumped around the sand, thrilled the bride spoke to them. But as quickly as the girls lined up to watch the Hawaiian wedding, the squealed away through the surf when a relative returned from the depths with what looked like an octopus on the end of his stick.
Surely both would enjoy a lovely meal that night, the Japanese eating slices of tako sushi at a fancy restaurant, and the young girls undoubtedly slurping on a similar dish of octopus…just with a better view of the ocean.