"In your Face" 2008 - Lambda print face mounted on plexiglass 30" x 18" (Detail)
Mystery isle: Photos from Rapa Nui Feb – April, 2008
For 30 years the idea of, the mysteries of Easter Island captured my imagination. Stone giants, aliens, long ears, reed boats from the Mediterranean. But the truth of the island is much more impressive and even scarier. I spent 35 days on this small island a 5 hour flight on a comfortable wide body jet from the capital of Chile. In this age of pervasive media nearly everyone has heard about the island with the big heads, but the know little more. Even people who know more have facts wrong or even miss the greatest mystery. Like missing the forest for the trees, if only there were any trees. For give my hyperbole, there are trees on the island now, brought from the main land to try and stop the massive erosion. There is also a town of 4000 with cold beer ice cream and scuba diving and the longest runway in the Southern Hemisphere.
This too is not what was most striking to me about this island. These are not the greatest human monument on the island the greatest work of men. No that is the complete lack of trees. The industrious, interconnected trade, rich social and cultural life that let to unchecked population growth, resource depletion and finally war strife famine and even cannibalism. When finally “found” 1792, nearly 700 years after first landing on Rapa Nui, there were a few thousand starving mostly naked people, almost 1000 stone statues ringing the island and not a scrap of wood more than an inch in diameter.
It would be another 300 years of suffering, starvation, disease, slavery and abuse before the islands mysteries would reveal themselves. Long after the last people to know the story, the last of the people who could read the writing the land offered up the tales of creation and destruction to science. Much has been written about this in recent years, so i wont here. Instead I want to share my view, my experience, my feeling of walking though this land day after day, trying to under stand how alone these people much have felt. No where to go to turn every one you have ever met or will ever meet, or even have ever heard of was born lived and died on this island. As things began to turn there was no where to run, no where to swim too, and with no trees, no boats to leave on. No where to turn but inward. like the statues, their ancestors standing in silent witness to the outcome of their decedents.
Rapa Nui
