Hawaii in focus.

Byline: LEWIS TAYLOR The Register-Guard

IN JUNE 1979, on the eve of his high school graduation, David Liittschwager left Eugene for an apprenticeship with a San Francisco photographer. He never looked back.

"The most interesting natural environment that I ever lived in, I couldn't wait to leave," Liittschwager said. "I was young, I was 17 years old, and it seemed like the thing to do - to go to the big city, to see the world."

Liittschwager would go on to see the world. Along the way, he would also work with famed photographer Richard Avedon, launch his own commercial studio and publish several photography books.

Now 40 and living in the San Francisco Bay area, Liittschwager was back in town not long ago to promote his latest book, "Remains of a Rainbow: Rare Plants and Animals of Hawai`i."

Co-shot by Liittschwager and his photography partner, Susan Middleton,"Remains of a Rainbow" is an eye-popping, 264-page photographic homage to the exotic plants and critters of our 50th state. The oversized coffee table book, which was published last fall by National Geographic, serves as the companion piece to a traveling museum exhibit currently showing at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

Clutching a cup of coffee and wearing his mid-length hair tied behind his head when he showed up at The Register-Guard for an interview, Liittschwager looked as if he had never left the Willamette Valley. His weathered face showed little emotion, but his enthusiasm for Hawaii was difficult to miss.

"Most people's ideas of the plants and animals of Hawaii are the sort of ideas from the projections of tourists," Liittschwager said. "They're the sort of images we get from advertising or posters from airports. Those images are about sea level and not about the real creatures that have been made by the place and have shaped the place."

Instead of palm trees and mai tais, Liittschwager and Middleton's version of Hawaii is one of iridescent bugs that come in four colors and funny-looking fish that climb waterfalls.

To emphasize their forms, most of the plants and critters in the book were taken out of context and set against solid black backdrops; but they're also, whenever possible, shown in their natural settings. The result is to emphasize their beauty and fragility while also recognizing their suitability to their environments.

"Hawaii is important both in the spectrum of biological diversity and in the spectrum of endangered species," Middleton said.

"It's one of the most biologically rich environments on Earth, and one of the most threatened."

Middleton and Liittschwager met shortly after Liittschwager left Eugene and headed to San Francisco.

At the time, Middleton worked as a photographer for the California Academy of Sciences. The two kept in contact even after Liittschwager moved to New York to work with Avedon on his "Portraits of the American West" project. Eventually, Middleton went to work for Avedon, too.

Years later, it was Middleton who sought out Liittschwager's help. The pair photographed endangered species for "Here Today: Portraits of Our Vanishing Species," a book published in 1991. Three years later, they finished a follow-up book, "Witness: Endangered Species of North America," a project that opened Liittschwager and Middleton's eyes to Hawaii.

"Before we even went there, it was pretty obvious from the endangered species list that Hawaii was an important place," Liittschwager recalled.

In addition to being a good place to ride a surfboard, Hawaii is home to more endangered species than any other state in the nation. The island chain's extreme geographic isolation (Hawaii is the most remote archipelago in the world), ensured the development of some of the most highly specialized species on the planet.

Plants and insects specific to single mountaintops evolved. So did flowers that bloomed once every 50 years and birds that didn't need wings.

The evolution of the island chain's ecosystem occurred so slowly that, scientists estimate, a new species emerged once every 10,000 years.

Unfortunately, many of the native species that once flourished in Hawaii proved to be highly susceptible to outside influence, which began some 1,500 years ago when the first Polynesians arrived on the islands. Plants and animals were over-harvested, goats ran wild, and invasive species choked out the native plants.

Today, more than half of the plants on the federal government's endangered species list hail from the Aloha State; a quarter of all the creatures on the list are Hawaiian.

While working on their second book, Liittschwager and Middleton learned of a fragile Hawaiian tree, called the Kokia cookei, which survived without a root system by grafting itself onto another endangered species.

It was that tree and its hanging-by- a-thread existence that solidified Liittschwager and Middleton's desire to do a book about Hawaii only.

"That tree became sort of emblematic of Hawaii for us and how terribly threatened some of the plants and animals are," Middleton said. "That tree can't even exist on its own roots."

Before starting "Remains of a Rainbow," Middleton and Liittschwager knew that they were about to undertake a substantial project.

By the time the nearly 5-pound book was completed, the pair had taken 20 trips to Hawaii and spent a total of 366 days in the field. They shot 2,000 rolls of film, and the book went through five revisions.

With plenty of photographic outtakes left, and many more creatures still left to shoot, the pair has not ruled out a second volume.

In all, 142 species are featured in the first volume. The creatures range from the stunning Haleakala silversword flower to the puzzling `o`opu nakea. There are compelling photos of a Kamehameha butterfly in development and amusing shots of Hawaiian happyface spiders (they really do look like they're smiling).

Unlike Liittschwager and Middleton's previous projects, there are few animals featured in "Rainbow."

"I'm more of a plant person now than I used to be, and that surprises me, because I still think of myself as a portrait photographer," Liittschwager said. "To know that I've been changed by the place. ... Maybe I'm not quite as cynical as I thought."

When Liittschwager was a young photographer growing up in Eugene, portraiture was his specialty. He shot photographs of local actors and musicians, and a memorable self-portrait of himself standing between two buildings in downtown Eugene, which his father, Terry, still treasures.

Liittschwager also took fashion portraits, shot publicity photos for the Eugene Opera and even made a 16mm film. A newspaper story on Liittschwager that appeared in a February 1979 edition of The Register-Guard portrayed a confident young artist out to conquer the photographic world.

Although Liittschwager doesn't remember the exact moment he fell in love with photography, he does recall being captivated by an old family photo album at an early age.

"Somebody was making some very nice pictures with a very simple little box camera," Liittschwager said. `I just thought, `How does this thing work?' That's what I remember was the puzzle, trying to figure the thing out.'

At the same time, another young local artist, David Loveall, also was trying to figure out photography. He worked alongside Liittschwager, shooting photographs of cheerleaders and football players for the Madison Middle School newspaper, The Scribe.

"We both had real strong desires to be photographers, but we didn't know where it would take us," said Loveall, who now has a professional studio in Eugene. "You could tell nothing was going to keep us from doing it."

In the ensuing years, Loveall and Liittschwager have walked in the same circles and kept tabs on each other. Loveall speaks glowingly of Liittschwager's new book, which, he says, shows Liittschwager's minimalist approach to nature photography.

"His style is very clean. It's very simple, and, yet, with the simplicity, there's a real sense of drama to it," Loveall said. "It evokes an emotion where you want to look deeper into the photo. It draws you in."

While working on "Rainbow," Liittschwager says he and Middleton tried to shoot in the field whenever possible. The pair took photos on precarious outcroppings accessible only by helicopter, worked closely with botanists and biologists, and even witnessed the scientific "discovery" of several new species.

Still, many of the photographs for the book were taken in labs, botanical gardens, zoos and nurseries, both for practical reasons and in order to avoid disrupting already-threatened species.

Shooting plants and animals in captivity posed its own problems.

At the Keauhou Bird Conservation Center on the Big Island, Liittschwager and Middleton ran into some opposition from scientists who were concerned that rare birds being readied for reintroduction would be disrupted by a photo shoot. After gaining the trust of the scientists, the pair had to contend with the animals themselves.

In one instance, while shooting a "neophobic" Palila bird, Middleton sat patiently for 14 days in front of a soundproof peephole, waiting for the perfect shot of the yellow-headed bird.

"I learned a lot about that bird," Middleton deadpans.

One of Liittschwager's most memorable shoots occurred while he and a team of scientists were scouting the summit of the 13,800-foot Mauna Kea. Instead of finding the creature they were looking for, the team encountered a wekiu wolf spider, a resilient arachnid that preys upon insects blown up the mountain by the Hawaiian trade winds.

"This spider was pretty great," Liittschwager said. "You wouldn't think anything could live up there. It is so desolate. There's no plant life for the last 10 miles on this road. It's really up there. You walk around sort of lightheaded, and then there are these spiders. ...'

While shooting in the field, Liittschwager lugged a 70-pound backpack filled with two or three cameras, film, lenses, light meters, electric flashes, reflectors, tripod, a cellular phone, a global positioning device, a compass, a first aid kit and other assorted gadgets.

Besides his cameras, the tool he used the most was a makeup brush, which came in handy for dusting the petals of flowers. For most of his photographs, he relied on a medium-format Hasselblad camera.

Although Liittschwager seems more concerned with photography than conservation, 15 years of shooting endangered species has left its mark. He hopes his book will appeal not only to environmentalists, but also might change the minds of those who believe it's either too late or think that extinction is a natural evolutionary process.

`When somebody asks, `What good is it?' the answer to me is obvious,' Liittschwager said. `We didn't make it, it's beautiful, and at the very least it has a right to be in the world - and I probably shouldn't even use the word `it.' '

After focusing so intensively on the endangered species of Hawaii, Liittschwager is left wondering about the critters waiting to be uncovered in other places - including the Willamette Valley, where he already has documented the famed northern spotted owl.

"I know that there are creatures within the tops of those trees that no human being has ever recognized as being something that the world made for a reason," Liittschwager said.

"The world is not used up. There are things that we are still clueless about. ... Hawaii has been looked at really carefully, and it's a small place. This (Oregon) is a big place and it hasn't been looked at too closely. That's interesting to me."

Reporter Lewis Taylor can be reached by phone at 338-2512 and by e-mail at [e-mail].