Posted on: Saturday, October 13, 2001
Book Review
'Rainbow' showcases Hawai'i nature photos
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Science Writer
 |
| "Remains of a Rainbow: Rare Plants and Animals of Hawai'i," by David Liittschwager and Susan Middleton, National Geographic Books 2001, 264 pages, $65. www.umbragebooks.com |
| 'Remains of a Rainbow' events
• Reading, signing and slide show, noon today, Borders Books & Music, Kaua'i |
I met photographers David Liittschwager and Susan Middleton a year or so ago as we all crawled across a steep hillside at the Limahuli Valley garden of the National Tropical Botanical Garden.
Among the rare native plants of the moist eastern end of the Na Pali Coast.
Their work in the Islands has resulted in the most stunning assemblage of images, perhaps, that exist of Hawaiian native wildlife.
"Remains Of A Rainbow: Rare Plants And Animals Of Hawai'i," a joint production of Environmental Defense and the National Geographic Society, is simply stunning.
The photographs — most of them portraits on a black or white background — are almost impossibly clear, displaying detail your eye might not pick out if you were looking at a plant or bird live.
You can see individual hairs on the petals of a native hibiscus, the moist gleam of the antennae of an O'ahu tree snail, and even pick out what appears to be the image of the camera reflected in the eye of the 'akohekohe, the amazing Hawaiian crested honeycreeper.
The pictures are so clear, so vibrant, that it is difficult to imagine that these plants and creatures are at risk of extinction — that some of them will most certainly be lost to the world, except for dusty museum collections and these photographs.
Their mission, the author/photographers say, is to help prevent that, "to help reveal the precarious rainbow of life which persists in these Islands, and to communicate its splendor and value."
Liittschwager and Middleton are veteran nature photographers, both of whom worked for a time with noted photographer Richard Avedon.
Their work since 1986 has been the recording of the rarest living things of this nation. Previous collaborations include, "Here Today, Portraits of Our Vanishing Species" in 1991, and "Witness: Endangered Species of North America" in 1994.
They have been at work on the Hawaiian species since 1998, laboring with the guidance of naturalists from the National Tropical Botanical Garden, the Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense and others.
When I talked with them at Limahuli, I gained the sense that in their photographic quests, they had also become experts of a sort, members of that strange community that deals the most with endangered species.
There can be a breathless feeling in viewing and handling unique genetic material that is in immediate danger of ceasing to exist.
Says Middleton of the species pictured in the book: "We wish to express that we are connected to them, and to suggest that they are our cousins in the larger community of life on Earth. We want to shine a light on them, show them for who they are, and help to give them the attention they deserve."
