John Wehrheim: Stratený raj

John Wehrheim, American photographer, filmmaker and engineer, was born in 1947 in Chicago. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana in 1969 and subsequently moved to the Hawaiian island of Kauai, where his well-known photographic collection Taylor Camp was created. This collection later became the basis for the photography book and documentary On Paradise’s Doorstep (2018). Wehrheim also farmed on the island, establishing papaya and banana plantations.

In 1991, he went to Bhutan as a hydroelectric engineer, where he made the documentary Bhutan: Middle Passage to Happiness (2018), for which he won two Emmy Awards. He has written a book about Bhutan and captured more than 20,000 photographs. He has exhibited his work around the world, including in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Prague and Bangkok, and his photographs have been published in prestigious magazines such as National Geographic, Forbes and the Huffington Post. Today he lives on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

In 1969, a group of Berkeley students who had fled a crackdown on anti-Vietnam War protests arrived on Kauai. After their arrest, Howard Taylor, brother of actress Elizabeth Taylor, bailed them out of jail and invited them onto his property. The group settled in Taylor Camp, where other freedom seekers eventually joined them. At its heyday, the community had 130 members, living in tree houses, growing their own food and spending time surfing. However, this experiment in a utopian way of life came to an end in 1977 when the local government decided to destroy the camp. Wehrheim documented the life of this community in more than 100 photographs, which became the basis for his book and film about Taylor Camp. The exhibition was curated by Adam Ligas, who lived in Hawaii for two years.