Charlie Osborn

This gallery is about photographic images of another time and place being brought back to life as photo illustration. I have reworked them extensively in order to create a dream-like aura as the photos are of eras that most of us can only imagine in our thoughts and dreams. The style is also reminiscent of very old movies where fading to dark edges was the norm. The images here span a timeframe of about the late-1800s to about 1940.

The images are not just random finds. They came about because one leg of my genealogy has native Hawaiian roots which has created my intense interest in all eras of Hawaiian history. I began working on these images about eight years ago after extracting the first two from a family photo album, and explored different approaches to give them a new life. The two I started with were taken by my grandmother in 1924 of her sister surfing at Waikiki and of her new husband of Hawaiian ancestry (not included here). From there it has simply grown with my active buying of old photos and photo postcards.

These images present aspects of life in Hawaii over the last 100 years or so as represented by the tourism industry. Since the mid-nineteenth century, tourism has been an integral part of Hawaii's economy. Tourism promotion has always used images of the islands and it's attractions to lure in tourists. Originally, illustrations were used, then around the turn of the 19th to 20th century, photography became the mainstay.

Tourism has been something of a two-edged sword for Native Hawaiians. These images tend to present life in Hawaii in a narrow, rather detached from native reality way, but they do evoke positive thoughts and memories for many, including myself, therefore I present them here in the spirit of Hawaiian aloha.

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