Claiming Moments in Honokeana Bay
Photographs, Memory, and Presence in Place
A friend texted me and told me I had to get an underwater film camera to take photos of the fish as they swam about. I told him that was a good idea. Before I could think another thought, I saw on my phone a notification saying he sent me some money to buy one. The next day, we drove out to Long’s Drugs and luckily they had some. I bought one then headed back to Honokeana Bay to take some photos of ourselves, my sibling Dyll and I, sea turtles, and whatever else it was we saw down there that day at that moment.
Once we were finished, we swam back in, excited at what we saw, but more so at the camera, the anticipation of seeing what it was we captured underwater, hoping that maybe the photos would turn out well, or at least well enough. Dyll, at one moment, began to say that they wanted to see their photos immediately.
Soon, as the days went on I started hearing everyone around us, myself included, obsess over taking photos to the point where I sometimes wasn’t sure if people were more excited for the photos themselves or the moment they were in. The moments almost seemed, for us tourists, like an aside, less significant than the little tokens of film and digitized light that could become proof of those brief times we had “out there” in someone else’s home.
I could feel myself at times more excited to share a photo I took rather than participating in what was going on around me. This is different than trying to take a beautiful photograph. To look at a good photograph is to see through the eyes of someone adept at paying attention to light, shape, and every context that surrounds the image. A good photograph is almost an explicit statement of the photographer’s awareness of the world. But the photos I, and thousands of other tourists across Maui and the Hawai’ian archipelago, were not all doing this. We were taking placeholders or timestamps, little tokens of moments we could excitedly go back to fondly, and especially with others, to show off what a beautiful time we had on our vacation. As a joke, when I felt these moments of stamping come on and I would take out my phone, I instead took dozens of photos as quickly as possible, making fun of myself and all of these forgetful photographs
One morning in Honokeana Bay I heard a little kid coming out of the water with their goPro, exclaiming that they got so close to a sea turtle. They said triumphantly they got a video and four photos of it! I remember another moment an old man asking for his goPro, seemingly unwilling to enter the water without it. I remember my sibling and I, excited to capture moments underwater with creatures both beautiful and alien to us. Yes, it was joyous and exciting in its own right, but how necessary were those photographs?
We’ve all been conditioned to believe this is the best way to remember a moment, to hold it steady in our memory and in others in order to keep the beauty of an experience alive. While this can be true—my friend who gave me the money for the film camera began taking photos because he realized he wants to be able to share and to look back at his past more closely—it also has the ability to separate ourselves from the moment itself.
In high school my friend Sandy, while showing me photos of his trip to the Galapagos when he was in the eighth grade, said he couldn’t remember a single thing about the trip anymore—just the photos as he’d become obsessed with cataloging everything when he was there. He was so fixated with not forgetting his time in the Galapagos that he was left with just these photos on his computer. While this might be an extreme, it does seem true that the more we look at photographs, it may bring back the feelings of those moments, but not necessarily the memories. Instead maybe the photograph, to a tourist or anyone clinging to the hope of stable memory, becomes the filler for the memory, taking its place rather than being a reminder of it. This urge to capture the moment is only heightened when you’re far away from home and familiarity.
On vacation, we want that perfect photograph that will capture what it was like to be there, to satisfy the tropes of the place where we visited. I found a few on that roll, and more still that I think are just beautiful pictures. We want the palm tree and turquoise waters. We want the image of the sea turtle, even if the moments we carry more deeply cannot be photographed. We want to recreate the postcards ourselves, remake the myth of a beautiful place with our own stories. Often, we are not trying to question the myth of these idealized places like Hawai’i, we want to hold them, saying we saw the myth right in front of us. And so we take our pictures, hopefully holding proof of our presence.
The following day after we snorkeled with the cameras, I noticed there was water inside my disposable. Worried I’d loose the film, I set out and started taking photos of everything, and as quickly as possible so I could remove the film. It was almost frantic the way I slipped into the water, swimming around looking to take pictures of fish and coral, anything somewhat interesting that I saw. I then got out of the water, finished my roll by taking pictures of Moloka’i, then set out removing the roll from the disposable camera. I was so concerned with preserving the photos I barely remember that morning snorkeling other than the anxious feeling that maybe this roll might not turn out, rather than how calmly the sea turtle was eating beside me, or how it came swimming toward me as I floated there, or how great it felt to be in the water with my family. But, as you can see, they turned out just fine, and yet I can’t help returning to that fiendish worry that the images, the validation of my snorkeling explorations, would disappear.
For myself, the pictures I took of the needlefish, the turtles, the wrasses in clouds of sediment are not what I remember most viscerally of Honokeana Bay, but the feeling of water cooling my body as I entered the bay, those first moments of seeing underwater as the current pulled me in. The film camera couldn’t capture that, and luckily so. I don’t want an image to distort that feeling for me if I can’t take the perfect picture. I want to hold it, to truly remember it. And I’m not so certain a photograph could do that. But maybe ask me about it in a year when I show off the photos I took underwater. Maybe by then I’ll have learned I am wrong.
