They both show and tell us their battles and the climate of the times. While many photographs rely on captions to provide context, Greevy’s are illuminated through his concentration on signage: “People Not Profits,” “No Bulldoze,” “Housing is a Right,” and “Decolonize.” Today viewers are able to consider Greevy’s tremendous output collectively, most readily in Kūʻē: Thirty Years of Land Struggles in Hawaiʻi, a hardcover photo essay book published in 2004. Everything else in the frame is shaken and disoriented, as if the world is exploding around him. In another well-known visual, a Hawaiian man in a gourd helmet, his arms crossed defiantly, protests the military bombing of Kahoʻolawe at the Hawai‘i State Capitol in 1977, a motion blur keeping only his eyes and head in tight focus. Or recall Terrilee Keko‘olani, a young adult defending Sandy Beach in 1972 against city plans to build a 5,000-unit housing development across the shoreline, the wind blowing dark locks of hair across her face as she speaks into a microphone.

Think of activist Haunani-Kay Trask, her fist thrusting forth from a gazebo at ʻIolani Palace, following a march in 1993 on the 100th anniversary of the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. Many people already know a Greevy photo without even knowing they do. The definition of a good photo is something that impacts you emotionally and imparts a lot of information. Inside there are, he estimates, 60,000 prints and negatives. The cabinet is largely organized by location, and on the side of each tray, bold, Sharpie-scrawled words announce their contents: “Kalama Valley,” “Chinatown,” “Mokauea Island,” “H-3,” “Makua,” and so forth-his filing system marching through Hawaiʻi’s notorious history of razing the natural landscape and evicting people from their residences. He swings them open to reveal neatly stacked black trays. It stands more than six feet high and has two gray doors. Set flush in a corner of the room is an industrial metal cabinet. “In a complicated photograph, the subject needs to be very clear,” Greevy says. Like a roll of negatives in a canister, the room feels like a tightly filled space in which time stands still. His living room is packed with black-and-white prints he has taken over the years-some are scattered across a coffee table, while others hang on the walls, covering nearly every inch. “The definition of a good photo is something that impacts you emotionally,” the 79-year-old says, “and imparts a lot of information.” On a summer morning at Ed Greevy’s apartment in Makiki, sunlight streams through a window and glints off his spectacles. Instead of shooting power from a distance, he shot it up close among the people and the crowds-and he would never need that Telefoto lens to do it. The effect of these visual rhythms transports the viewer into the same psychological sphere: You feel in the middle of something big. His coverage of protests, speeches, and civil disobedience in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s over the development of Hawai‘i’s beaches, the displacement of local communities, and desecration of Hawaiian culture would achieve the visual depth he searched for in those waves.Ī tight frame could be dedicated to a person rallying at a podium or a wide shot of a crowd so overwhelming it was rendered a single solid shape. The images for which he became most known have little to do with surfers or surfing, yet they zeroed in on a sea of change, swelling around Hawaiʻi’s rising social consciousness. It is this creative impulse to reach the center of a subject that would drive and inform Greevy’s photographic career in the decades that followed. He aimed to produce images that made it seem as if the viewer was right there in the barrel.

An aspiring surf photographer, Greevy reasoned he needed the heavy-duty piece of equipment to zoom in on Oʻahu’s powerful breaking waves from the shore. Here, a look back on how those movements formed and resisted, as he observed from behind the camera.Įd Greevy’s first camera lens-a 500-millimeter Telefoto-was an extravagant purchase for 1962. For more than three decades, photographer Ed Greevy documented land struggles and political strife in the Hawaiian Islands.

Political strife