Aloha! DailyDOCUMERICA has been on vacation for a few weeks, but now we’re back and ready to share some great Hawaii images from Project DOCUMERICA. Charles (Chuck) O’Rear, now famous for his Napa Valley wine country photography, was the lucky DOCUMERICA photographer assigned to locations of environmental concern all over Hawaii, not just at the popular beaches and tourist spots. His photos cover the good and the bad of what was happening in Hawaii in the early 1970s; fun images of throngs of tourists learning the hula or hitting the beaches, but also alarming images of urbanization, heavy Honolulu traffic and destruction of pineapple fields.
We’ve picked only a handful of images from the 390 photographs by O’Rear found in the final edited DOCUMERICA collection at the National Archives. So, just hang loose, and in the spirit of Aloha …
we begin this feature with a photograph of a young Hawaiian woman about to take part in the annual Aloha Day Parade, October 1973.
