honorable mention
Matt Shallenberger united states
title
The Leaping Place
Guided by deceased ancestors and guardian gods, they search for places from which they may travel to the underworld,
commune with ancestors, explore the many-leveled ghost worlds, or return to the dim past from which all life sprang
up. These pathways take many forms: cliffs, trees, forest clearings, and more.
They are called leaping places.
The photographs in this series tell two ghost stories:
First, of my ancestors, who immigrated to Hawaii a century before I was born there. The path of these photographs was
built around their recollections. These are the landscapes of my youth, and their history.
Second, they illustrate the Kumulipo, the ancient Hawaiian creation chant - a memorized poem of more than 2000 lines that
tells myths of the earliest beginnings of the Hawaiian people. The titles of the images, and the scenes depicted, are drawn from
its pages.
The recitation of the Kumulipo was an act shared between the teller and the listener. Beneath the stories of gods and men,
the chant-teller buried 'kaonas' - secret metaphors that connected the passages. The leaping place idea is one of those secrets.
Amid the forests and deserts of the big island, there are pathways not only between life and death, but history and myth, fact
and fiction, and memory and imagination. These are the places where we step not only into our own past, but each other's.
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entry description
In ancient Hawaiian mythology, the souls of the dead detach from their bodies and wander among the living, unseen.Guided by deceased ancestors and guardian gods, they search for places from which they may travel to the underworld,
commune with ancestors, explore the many-leveled ghost worlds, or return to the dim past from which all life sprang
up. These pathways take many forms: cliffs, trees, forest clearings, and more.
They are called leaping places.
The photographs in this series tell two ghost stories:
First, of my ancestors, who immigrated to Hawaii a century before I was born there. The path of these photographs was
built around their recollections. These are the landscapes of my youth, and their history.
Second, they illustrate the Kumulipo, the ancient Hawaiian creation chant - a memorized poem of more than 2000 lines that
tells myths of the earliest beginnings of the Hawaiian people. The titles of the images, and the scenes depicted, are drawn from
its pages.
The recitation of the Kumulipo was an act shared between the teller and the listener. Beneath the stories of gods and men,
the chant-teller buried 'kaonas' - secret metaphors that connected the passages. The leaping place idea is one of those secrets.
Amid the forests and deserts of the big island, there are pathways not only between life and death, but history and myth, fact
and fiction, and memory and imagination. These are the places where we step not only into our own past, but each other's.
about the photographer
Matt Shallenberger is currently based in Los Angeles, and originally from Hawaii. His focus is primarily on large format landscapes, exploring the relationship between local mythologies and the environments which inspired them.back to gallery