Ryan Thompson: AH AH Conscience Letters and Photographs from the Haleakalā and Hawai'i Volcanoes National Parks

Ah! Sorry… Following a trail of regret from the Petrified Forest (the subject of his classic Bad Luck, Hot Rocks) to the islands of Maui and Hawai’i, artist and educator Ryan Thompson considers the implications of another trove of handwritten apologies, this time from the archives of the Haleakalā and Hawai’i Volcanoes National Parks.

Written to accompany chunks of volcanic rock and other objects that tourists have pilfered from the Islands and subsequently returned (because of bad luck or bad conscience), the notes and letters express not only a need for forgiveness but also an awareness of the writers’ relationship to the Hawaiian landscape, and perhaps also to Earth itself — a taking-and-returning phenomenon that (as noted in Thompson’s earlier book) is its own form of absolution and self-help. AH AH weaves together Thompson’s own black-and-white travelogue photographs, vibrantly colored ‘portraits’ of the returned specimens, and facsimiles of selected letters into an endearing reflection on humanity’s troubling (but hopeful) entanglement with geology, colonialism, and tourism in the Anthropocene.