BLUE HAWAII

Italian artist and photographer Fabrizio Amoroso takes us inside his world of virtual Hawaiian travel, after soliciting thousands of vacation slides from strangers decades in the past.

“I’ve never been to Honolulu” is about what it means to photograph reality and what reality means at the same time from a photographic point of view.

I’ve never been to Honolulu but I’ve always dreamed about it, so the only way that I had at the time to satisfy my curiosity about Hawaii was to start buying slides on the internet to find something unexpected and that I could call real. After collecting around 3500 slides from different individuals, I discovered that somehow I had recreated and recollected my own pseudo reality about Hawaii.

At that point I realized that I could just edit and reframe inside the images as I would have done with my camera if I had been there- to finally give my point of view about that experience.

The result is a reportage of Hawaii of the 80s, of a cruise of people that have physically been there but at the same time have never really been to Honolulu- confined by that Western comfort that doesn’t really allow for a full experience.

Neither me, nor the crew of the cruise have ever really been to Hawaii but at the same time we have both been there from a photographic point of view.

So, in the end does photography really help us to understand and define what is reality?

See full slideshow above.