American Made: Ansel Adams and the Bishop National Bank’s The Islands of Hawaii

Abstract

Ansel Adams first travelled to Hawai‘i in 1948 for a project covering the US national parks and monuments. He returned in 1957 and 1958 under commission from the Bishop National Bank of Hawaii (now First Hawaiian Bank) to produce the centennial publication The Islands of Hawaii. The photographer’s visits coincided with the US territory’s postwar campaign for statehood, which began in 1947 when the first postwar bill for statehood appeared before Congress and ended in 1959 when Hawai‘i became the nation’s fiftieth state. This article considers Adams’s work in the islands within the context of the postwar Hawaiian statehood campaign and in relation to the photographer’s previous work at the Manzanar Relocation Center. Focusing on Adams’s photographs of island residents within The Islands of Hawaii in relation to discourses of race and nationhood in the mid-twentieth century, this article begins to develop a line of inquiry into the artist’s political engagements outside his well-known conservation efforts.