John Wehrheim – Paradise Lost
In the tumultuous year of 1969, 13 students from the University of California at Berkeley arrived on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Repressive forces brutally suppressed their protests against the Vietnam War on campus, leaving them with no choice but to take up arms or leave. They were soon arrested in Hawaii for “vagrancy” and sentenced to 90 days of hard labor.
When Howard Taylor, brother of the famous American actress Elizabeth, heard about this in the local newspaper, he posted bail and invited the group of students to his beautiful beachfront property.
The pristine spot became a magnet for surfers, students or Vietnam veterans looking for peace and quiet. At its heyday, the community had more than 130 residents. They lived in tree houses, grew their own food, and filled their free time with surfing or playing beach volleyball. They lived their dream without government or laws, yet they had one thing in common – a desire for freedom.
The phenomenon called Taylor Camp, like the Woodstock music festival, became a symbol of an era full of revolution. However, a utopia based on human ideals and harmonious coexistence with nature ended in flames in 1977. The local government decided to destroy the camp under the pretext of creating a state park.
American photographer John Wehrheim captured the life of the community in more than 100 photographs. The photographic collection has become the most comprehensive documentation of this utopian settlement. Four decades later, the author published a book of photographs called Taylor Camp and made a documentary film called On the Threshold of Paradise (2018). The exhibition is curated by Adam Ligas, who spent two years in the Hawaiian Islands.
American photographer, filmmaker and engineer John Wehrheim was born in 1947 in the state of Chicago. He graduated from the Catholic University of Notre Dame in 1969. After graduation, he traveled to the Hawaiian island of Kauai to create the Taylor Camp photographic collection. This work was later published as a photography book, and he made a documentary film about the collection, On the Threshold of Paradise (2018).
He establishes the largest papaya and banana plantations on the island, a testament to his renaissance talents. As a hydropower engineer, he travels to the Kingdom of Bhutan in 1991, where his work takes him to places no one had previously captured. There, he filmed the documentary Bhutan: Middle Path to Happiness (2018), for which he won two Emmy Awards. A year later, he is publishing a book about the Himalayan kingdom, Bhutan: The Secret Land of Happiness. He still photographs the country today and has taken more than 20,000 photographs there.
He has had solo exhibitions in cities such as Los Angeles, Bangkok, Thimphu, Tokyo, Prague and Honolulu. His work has been published across the world in magazines such as Magnus, Forbes, National Geographic and Huffington Post. His work is included in many collections in the Americas. He currently lives on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.
