Bamboo Ridge Issue 77

Thirty years ago, or even 10 years ago, you could imagine that Waialua would always be a sugar mill town. But in 1996 the mill was suddenly closed. It was the last one on Oʻahu. Today, there are only a handful of sugar mills left on Maui and Kauaʻi. Sugar in Hawaiʻi has been dying for years. It is perhaps as good as dead. Most of those immense landscapes of cane grasses are now fields of weeds or other smaller crops. The mills are rusting or dismantled. Only a few camps are left, mostly terminally run-down. The sugar towns no longer have a sugar-town future...

What about the people in the photographs? The lifestyle of a community is portrayed in momentary click of a shutter as these people share a few moments or a fraction of a second of their lives for the camera. They have given a gift of memory to the future, to those who wish to see and understand something of the life they and their fellow workers led.