Photographer Richard Misrach's connection to Hawai'i seems — as in his large-scale photographs — one of immersion and transformation.

Take his chosen medium. Maybe it was the tropics' intensely saturated palette, but when he first began shooting photographs on the Big Island in 1978, the artist switched from black-and-white to color film, and has never looked back.

Misrach would return to Hawai'i several times over the years, but in 1997 started to vacation annually in Waikiki. It was on one such holiday, in the fall of 2001, that he began to regard the world's most iconic beach as a visual microcosm of post-9/11 consciousness: an altered mindset reflected graphically in people's poses, in the space between them, in their vulnerability versus the ocean's chasmic enormity.

The next year, Misrach returned — this time with a camera — to begin shooting what would become his "On the Beach" series.

"My thinking was influenced by the events of 9/11, as well as by the 1950s Cold War novel and film, 'On the Beach.' ... For me, the work is both a celebration of our survival and an elegy," Misrach explains.