ABOVE: Schooling akule, one of Levin's favorite subjects.
He'd visit and swim at Honaunau—the place he now calls home. "I was so taken with how beautiful it looked when the waves broke on the reef and drained back into the ocean that I wanted to photograph it," Levin recalls. He borrowed a friend's camera, got dragged over the reef and scratched the lens. "He told me, 'OK, you bought my camera.'" That was the beginning of Levin's exploration of the undersea world through a viewfinder. He has since become renowned for his black-and-white photographs of marine life and surfers, images that have been described as "haunting and mercurial," "elegant" and "a glowing world of light poured into water, of silver clarity and dim, depthless mystery."
From July 25 through August 31, 2024, the Downtown Art Center in Honolulu will host Levin's first retrospective show, Wayne Levin, A Life in Photography, Retrospective 1965-2024, a sweeping exhibit spanning his sixty-year career. The work isn't all oceanographic: Levin documented the 1965 civil rights march from Selma and the restoration of the island of Kahoolawe following decades of military bombing. He shot at Kalaupapa, the remote peninsula on Molokai where Hansen's disease patients were exiled, and juxtaposed images taken on both sides of the border wall in Texas. "Wayne is not the disengaged observer," says exhibition curator and fellow photographer Floyd K. Takeuchi, "but rather a photographer who goes all in, whether he's marching for justice or diving deep to capture the beauty of nature at its best."
A new retrospective featuring the work of renowned Hawaii photographer Wayne Levin includes underwater images like the one above of kamanu (rainbow runners) hunting akule (big-eye scad) as well as historic photos of the culmination of the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, March 1965 (below).
Nature at its best has resulted in some of Levin's most memorable images. Over numerous dives to photograph large schools of akule (big-eyed scad), he became fascinated by the way they seemed to move as a single organism. "Their movements were so coordinated, it made me wonder: What's the individual, actually? Is it the fish or is it the school?" Levin started photographing the behavior of other groups, too, from migrating geese in the Pacific Northwest to starling flocks in England. "I heard about this Aspen grove in Utah called the Pando," he says, explaining how he pursued the idea to its apotheosis. "It's arguably the largest single being in the world."
Images of these amorphous schools will be on view, as well as selections fromThe Edge (his first underwater exhibition in color, which focuses on the intersection among water, earth and air), as well as photographs from Kure, Bikini Atoll, Kona and other waters that can be anything but pacific. "When I go into the ocean and put myself into an environment that's much more powerful than I am, it's only by its grace that I return," Levin says. "I ask permission from Kanaloa, the Hawaiian god of the ocean, each time before I enter, and then give thanks when I get back."
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