Piliāmoʻo means “to cling as a lizard” in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi. It evokes an image of a moʻo, a lizard-like creature or water-protecting deity that clings to the walls of Oʻahu’s Koʻolau mountain range, overlooking the district of Koʻolaupoko with a watchful protecting eye. Photographers Mark Hamasaki and Kapulani Landgraf, who collaborate as Piliāmoʻo, are two of Oʻahu’s most prolific creatives of the past few generations.

Their partnership began in 1989, when Landgraf was Hamasaki’s student at Windward Community College. In the darkroom, she discovered that they were both photographing the construction of Oʻahu’s Interstate H-3. Their shared subject was the freeway not as American progress, but as devastation. That set the course for a decades-long collaboration centered on Koʻolaupoko.

Piliāmoʻo’s first series, Ē Luku Wale Ē (devastation after devastation), documented the destruction of numerous sacred sites in the wake of the freeway’s construction. It has been the subject of extensive writing and exhibition-making by scholars and activists. Curator Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick describes Piliāmoʻo’s work as a vital kūʻē-archive, or a resistance counter-archive, that preserves evidence of erasure, displacement, and struggle. Not just a record of what was done, Piliāmoʻo’s photographs show us what must be protected.

Ē Luku Wale Ē established a methodology for Piliāmoʻo, setting the stage for future projects, including Hoʻi ka Wai: Waiāhole in 1997 and Kailua between 2005 and 2007. 

The Koʻolau mountain range divides Oʻahu into Windward and Leeward sides. The Windward (wetter) side of the island faces the prevailing northerly winds. The Leeward side is drier, facing away and protected by the Koʻolaus.

For over a century, the community of Waiāhole within the moku, or district, of Koʻolaupoko experienced incursions into their valley and their ways of living. The Waiāhole Ditch System, built between 1913 and 1916, diverted stream and mountain water from Windward valleys and through the mountain range. The water traveled over 25 miles to irrigate sugar plantations on Oʻahu’s arid Leeward plains. The sugar industry extracted an estimated 27 million gallons per day, destroying native stream life, subsistence farming, kalo (the taro plant) cultivation, estuaries, and offshore fisheries on the Windward coast.  

But the case for returning Waiāhole’s waiwai, wealth and abundance (from wai, which means water), began building only 80 years after the construction of the Waiāhole Ditch. In 1993, Amfac, the primary user of the ditch, announced that it would close its Oʻahu Sugar Company. This sparked an unprecedented legal battle over water that would shape Hawaiʻi’s future forever.

The US Department of Agriculture filed a petition to reserve the Waiāhole Ditch flow for agricultural uses. The beneficiaries included Kamehameha Schools, several private estates and corporations, the US Navy, and a number of golf course and resort developments. The Water Commission recognized these Leeward parties as “existing uses” and sought to keep subsidized streamwater flowing to the Leeward plains.

Against this backdrop, community members fought to show those in power and the broader public that water is not a commodity for corporate industrial farming and speculative development—that it is critical to lifeways in Koʻolaupoko. Windward farmers and families as well as community coalitions such as the Makawai Stream Restoration Alliance, Hakipuʻu ʻOhana, Waiāhole–Waikāne Community Association, and Kahaluʻu Neighborhood Board, began organizing to challenge powerful Leeward interests. They petitioned for returning the waters and restoring streamflows. In December 1994, after months of pressure, the Water Commission adopted a six-month agreement that allowed 14 million gallons of water per day to be released into the streams.

Piliāmoʻo had entered the movement at a critical moment. Uncle Calvin Hoe, an artist, kalo farmer, musician, and activist, invited them to document the Waiāhole community and way of life. This was particularly significant in the face of more than two dozen state and corporate agencies that had the funds to market their own positions. Piliāmoʻo’s photographs were ultimately entered as evidence in what would become Hawaiʻi’s first major contested case over water and a landmark case for public trust doctrine.

In Waiāhole: Hoʻi ka Wai, Piliāmoʻo showed the community opening up an ancient ʻauwai, an irrigation channel. Its primary purpose is to feed fresh water from the Waiāhole stream to loʻi kalo, terraced fields for taro cultivation in the valley. When community members began working at 9 a.m., the ʻauwai was completely swallowed by hau and filled with dirt. You could barely see it. By noon, after a few hours of collective labor, the channel had been opened, and water was flowing through places that had been dry for many years. Landgraf remembers this as her first introduction to the Waiāhole community. The event made visible their persistence and strength.

Piliāmoʻo would continue to document the community across ongoing court challenges and public hearings. Their photographs were used as evidence of how Hawaiians and local farmers sustained themselves on the land. As Waiāhole kalo farmer Charlie Reppun has noted, one of the hardest parts of the hearings was convincing government decision-makers that kalo needs fresh, cold, running water to thrive. Piliāmoʻo addressed that by showing how water, even partially returned, moved freely through ʻauwai and loʻi, creating the optimal conditions for kalo cultivation.

The struggle would finally culminate in 2000 when, in a landmark decision, the Supreme Court reaffirmed water as a public trust responsibility, returning nearly half of the water diverted from Waiāhole and other nearby streams.

If Ē Luku Wale Ē was about devastation—the destruction of land and sacred sites—Hoʻi Ka Wai, turned toward resilience. For Waiāhole and its people, fighting was not new. They had lived through lease battles and threats of eviction in the 1970s. But here, the Waiāhole community not only saw water returned to their stream but also ensured that water was recognized as a public trust for Hawaiʻi’s people. 

In Kailua, Piliāmoʻo extended their place-based photographic practice into one of Oʻahu’s most rapidly transforming communities. Whereas Hoʻi ka Wai emerged from the urgency of a contested case, Kailua made visible the layered histories of place, not as scenery but as kuleana, responsibility.

The project was to create a book—a history of Kailua told through its residents. It would document Kailua’s wahi pana (storied, sacred places), and community members across the ahupuaʻa (traditional land division) of Kailua. It began with an invitation from Hawaiʻi-book designer Barbara Pope—a kupa, native of the land of Maunawili in Kailua—alongside community members and the Kailua Historical Society. In Kailua, Piliāmoʻo’s contemporary photographs appear alongside historic ones and material sourced from community members and archives. The book features newly commissioned essays and stories written by residents, oral history transcripts, mele (songs and chants), and moʻolelo (histories and stories). Kīhei de Silva, renowned Hawaiian scholar and contributor, bestowed the book’s full title shortly before it went to press: Kailua: In the Wisps of the Malanai Breeze.

Pope’s friendship with Landgraf and deep regard for her research-driven practice helped shape the book. For both of them, this project was about reanimating beloved places through presence, conversation, and image. Piliāmoʻo would join Pope for interviews with kūpuna, elders and ancestors, who knew the land intimately. Sometimes, the two would trek to ancient sites in the overgrown jungle. Pope recalls how people and places would come to life when simply asked. She said, a place would “reveal itself through Piliāmoʻo’s attention, after being unattended to for such a long time.”

Piliāmoʻo’s photographs move beyond picturesque postcard views of Kailua as an idyllic tourist playground or a romanticized countryside. They resist the language of American landscape photography, which turns place into “frontier” or “paradise”—and paradise into possession. Through their signature black-and-white silver gelatin process, they strip away the seduction of color, revealing modernity encroaching on the quieter, older ways of living that still persist.

For those who call Kailua home and those seeking to reconnect with ancestors from these lands, Piliāmoʻo’s photographs affirm continued presence. In the book’s introduction, Davianna Pomaikaʻi McGregor writes about its underlying message: that “those who live in and enjoy Kailua should work together to reconnect with and care for the land and water resources of their ahupuaʻa.”

In Kailua, Piliāmoʻo’s photographs do more than document transformation. They help Hawaiians reconnect to ʻāina, land (literally: “that which feeds”), and kūpuna. Meanwhile, they remind those who live there that these places are layered with stories—with lives that came long before them and will continue long after. This is one of the functions of Hawaiian photography: to preserve what is threatened and to make visible the obligations and relations that bind people to place.

For me, this is personal. Five generations ago, my ancestors lived in Kailua. My two kūpunakāne kuakolu, third-great-grandfathers, resided Makai (toward the ocean) at Kawailoa and Mauka (toward the mountains) in Maunawili for their entire lives. I only learned that these were my kūpuna doing genealogy research with my grandpa’s sister shortly after this book’s third printing. Unexpectedly, Piliāmoʻo’s photographs became not only a pathway back to these places my kūpuna loved and called home but also a reminder that these wahi pana still ask something of us.

Together, Hoʻi ka Wai and Kailua demonstrate how photography can reanimate and restore connections that were once severed, making return, in its many forms, possible. Both projects insist on the same truths: wai is not just a resource, ʻāina is not a backdrop, kūpuna are not far away. When we really pay attention and listen to the voices of the land, our responsibility to it comes into focus. Change begins with the steady work of remembering, of caring, of working the land, and of living as if these wahi pana are still animated with the ancestors and stories that came long before us and will persist for generations after. 

About the Author

Josh Tengan is an arts worker, curator, and collaborator born, raised, and living in Pauoa, Kona, Oʻahu. He is Director of Curatorial Initiatives at Puʻuhonua Society, a community arts organization dedicated to Hawaiʻi and its abundant futures, and was previously Associate Director of Hawaiʻi Contemporary, which presents the Hawaiʻi Triennial.