ABOVE: Rikki Cooke sets up his camera in the Mokio Preserve, Molokai. Cooke, who lives on Molokai, has traveled the world shooting for National Geographic and published Molokai: An Island in Time in 1984, one of the most enduring photographic records of the island to date. PHOTOGRAPH BY PF BENTLEY
It is July 7, 1972, and a 28-year-old Rikki Cooke is silent behind a self-made hunter's blind at Kaluakoi, on Molokai's dry western end. Once an avid hunter, Cooke isn't here for quarry; he's photographing the herds of invasive axis deer gathered at an artificial watering hole on his family's land, Molokai Ranch, the second-largest cattle ranch in Hawaii.
Back home from graduate school on the continent, Cooke has traded his rifle for a Canon, determined to get close to the deer and photograph them in stunning detail. But that's not easy for the 6'4" Cooke, crouching behind his blind. "To shoot an effective photograph of the deer, you need to be close," Cooke says. "The challenge is they can hear the click of my film camera. So long as they can't smell or hear me, there is a sort of stalemate, and they don't necessarily run." It turned out to be worth the effort; Cooke's axis deer photos launched his career as a photographer and led to the publication of one of the most enduring and recognizable photographic records of Hawaii, Molokai: An Island in Time.
Published in 1984, Cooke's autobiographical coffee-table book helped set a new standard for photography books in Hawaii. The island's "elusive beauty appears in common things, like the red dust of the West End, the cool winds of the highlands, the roll of the sea on sand, a greeting from a passing friend," Cooke wrote in the preface. "I want these photographs to present Molokai as she is: unadorned, rugged and honest." The island hasn't changed much since the publication of Cooke's homage; it's still largely undeveloped, with a population of about 7,500; in that way, his images seem at once historic and contemporary.
Cooke photographs and prints only what he actually sees. He's particular about lighting, and shoots his Kodachrome photos mostly at dawn, at sundown or with an overcast sky or rain. "You look at a photograph and it has no gimmicks. It happened exactly that way for one moment in time, and the camera caught it," Cooke said in a 1974 interview in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. "If you had been there at that moment, you would have seen just that."
Cooke's image of Pushkar Fair, India, in 1968, the year his encounter with John Lennon in Rishikesh led both to the song "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" and to Cooke's transformation from trophy hunter to conservationist.
Scion of a prominent kamaaina family, Richard A. Cooke III's great-great-grandparents, Amos Starr Cooke and Juliette Montague Cooke, ran the Chiefs' Children's School, founded by King Kamehameha III, to educate the children of Hawaiian alii (royalty). In 1897, their son, Charles M. Cooke became part owner of Molokai Ranch, which was purchased from the estate of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop. Twelve years later, after an attempt to grow sugarcane failed, Charles bought out his partners and became the ranch's sole owner.
He appointed one of his sons, George P. Cooke (Rikki's great-uncle), as general manager. Under his stewardship the hundred-thousand-acre ranch became the second-largest producer of cattle in the state (only Parker Ranch on Hawaii Island produced more). For a short time the ranch was also the largest producer of honey in the entire United States, until disease wiped out the island's honeybees. For more than sixty years, the ranch's lands were among the world's leading producers of pineapples.
For as long as Cooke can remember, Molokai has held a special place for him. "My earliest childhood memories are of vacations I spent with my family on these lands," wrote Cooke decades later.
Cooke's transformation from hunter to conservationist began in March 1968. At the time, he was visiting his mother, Nancy Cooke de Herrera, in Rishikesh, India. His mother was an ardent supporter of the Indian religious leader Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who developed the Transcendental Meditation practice that became popular in the late 1960s. Cooke arrived in Rishikesh just at the moment the Maharishi was hosting his most famous devotees: the Beatles.
During the visit, Cooke and his mother were invited along on a tiger hunt with a big-game hunter from Texas. The hunter was stationed on a machan, a platform in a tree, while the Cookes rode elephants. In the afternoon, Cooke switched places with the hunter; that's when he spotted the tiger. "I knew the tiger was coming because I could see all the monkeys and little animals that had started to run out ahead of it. Employees cleared an area of about twenty feet," Cooke recalls. "Before I knew it, the tiger ran out. I can still remember shooting straight down at the tiger and seeing it roll over." While the big-game hunter got credit for the kill, it was Cooke who fired the fatal shot.
Cooke's image of a storm off the eastern shore of the Kalaupapa peninsula, site of the Hansen's disease settlement on Molokai. Cooke visited Kalaupapa in 1980 to photograph Richard Marks, then serving as sheriff of Kalawao County, who, Cooke says, probably wore his uniform for the first time to pose for the image.
The next day, the Cookes returned to the ashram and Rikki's mother recounted the story for the Maharishi. Sitting nearby was John Lennon, quietly scribbling in his notebook. "My mother was so excited to tell Maharishi about the hunt. Lennon was horrified to hear about me shooting a tiger," Cooke says, adding that the Beatle, who'd been silent up to that point, vocally condemned the hunt as "life-destruction."
Cooke had been studying Hindu religious texts, and in his conversation with the Maharishi, he tried to cite these texts as justification for the hunt to rebut Lennon's accusation. "The Maharishi said, 'Life-destruction is life—destruction,'" Cooke recalls. "His response couldn't have been a more cold, more stern sort of 'end-of-story' moment. Six months later, the Beatles released the song 'The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,'" one of the memorable tracks from the "White Album." "My sister called and said, 'I think this song is about you.'" The physical description of Bungalow Bill as an "all-American bullet-headed Saxon mother's son" certainly fit Cooke's description, he says. "I was 24. I had very short hair from being on the UCLA crew team."
So, with a little help from his "friends," Cooke shifted from life-destruction to life-celebration-through photography, a pursuit that turned out to be both more rewarding and more challenging than hunting. "It is much more difficult to photograph a deer than to shoot one," Cooke said in a 1974 interview.
After India, Cooke attended the University of Oregon's School of Architecture and Environment in 1972. While there, Cooke continued to take photos, fascinated by the poignantly abandoned and decaying cars he saw on his frequent road trips around the West. After graduating he returned to Molokai, hoping to document it before the changes soon to come: Kaluakoi was slated to be developed into a resort hotel and golf course.
In addition to getting close to the axis deer, Cooke photographed everywhere he went on Molokai. "Some places on the island feel permanent, like guardians against the wind and sea and time. This sandstone shoreline is a rugged place of jagged rocks, jagged lines. Here at the edge of the island where life looks permanent, there is constant change," wrote Cooke about one of the memorable photos in the book of the unusual rock formations at Moomomi, on the north shore of Molokai.
In 1973, Cooke, who had never formally studied photography, was invited to participate in gallery shows in Honolulu, where his axis deer images were a hit. Among those who saw them was architect Alfred Preis, then the executive director of the Hawaii State Foundation for Culture and the Arts. Preis offered Cooke the position of artist-in-residence on Molokai, teaching photography to schoolchildren.
"I'm big, you know—my nickname is Bear," says Cooke. "I can't hide and sneak a photograph. My approach is to ask permission—to collaborate with the person I'm photographing. I'm not good at hiding, but I'm good at asking permission."
Cooke's 1981 portrait of Molokai farmer Rachel Naki, then 77. A larger-than-life mural of Naki based on Cooke's photograph is on the campus of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Bear as a cub photographer.
In collaboration with the SFCA, "For three years we created a photography program called 'Seeing Molokai,' and I taught it to all the fourth-graders on the island," says Cooke. "I also taught high school students. Everyone shot on Kodachrome. As a culmination, the students would do a presentation to their school, and then all the schools would get together and do a slide presentation of Molokai as seen by its children," says Cooke. "And then, while on Molokai, I got my first assignment from Bob Gilka at National Geographic. That call changed my life."
Gilka, the magazine's revered director of photography, had a reputation for nurturing photographers and supporting their fieldwork. Under his leadership, National Geographic's circulation exploded from 1.5 million to nearly 11 million subscribers. Gilka encouraged photographers to pitch; he liked Cooke's idea to shoot a feature story about Molokai and did everything he could to get him started. "He sent me $10,000 in cash and five hundred rolls of film. He also sent me different pieces of camera equipment that I had been missing. He sent me all the underwater camera gear I could use," Cooke recalls. "To me it did seem like a dream come true." But it came with a heavy responsibility: "I've never been so scared in my life because all of a sudden, all my excuses were gone. The only limitation was me."
Gilka cautioned Cooke not to be complacent. Shooting photographs in "your own backyard," he said, can be both a blessing and a curse. Photographers often overlook well-known places and things. "In a way, it was probably my most difficult assignment, because it was the one I cared for the most," says Cooke, whose photographs would eventually accompany the August 1981 article "Molokai: Forgotten Hawaii" in National Geographic.
After completion of his Molokai assignment, Cooke found steady work as a photographer for the National Geographic Society, traveling and working on book projects like America's Ancient Cities and Blue Ridge Range: The Gentle Mountains. "All the assignments that I've had from National Geographic, and just my general approach overall to photography, is to photograph the beauty of a place. I want my photographs to spread the good news of a place," said Cooke.
In the 1994, Cooke and his wife, Bronwyn Cooke, found another way to spread the good news of Molokai through Hui Hoolana, a nonprofit they founded that hosts workshops, yoga retreats and photography classes on their home property.
Cooke's image of rough seas looking east from Kaiehu ("sea-spray") Point along the rugged coast of Molokai's north shore, where sea cliffs rise to some four thousand feet from deep water.
Cooke's photography has led him a very long way from life-destruction; today, at 80 ("but I feel I'm in my sixties," he says), he's one of the state's leading voices for conservation. He's active with nonprofits such as the Cooke Family Foundation, The Nature Conservancy of Hawaii and, more closely, the Molokai Land Trust.
"The beautiful moments captured on film ended up becoming a tool for protecting all of these different areas. That is what led to me being active in conservation and running a conservation organization. Rather than just becoming an advocate, you become the protector," says Cooke, who's served a decade as president of the Molokai Land Trust's board of directors. The trust is responsible for protecting the 1,718-acre Mokio Preserve on the island's northwest coast and the 196.4 acres of the Kawaikapu Preserve on the east end.
Mokio contains about five miles of rugged shoreline with thriving native coastal plants, dune ecosystems, seasonal wetlands and several ancient Hawaiian sites, including an adze quarry at Puu Kaeo. While today 95 percent of its land is covered by non-native species, the trust, in partnership with community members and local organizations, is working to restore native habitat. Kawaikapu ("sacred water") is home to a perennial stream and a remnant native forest. Approximately 70 percent of its acreage is also covered by non-native species, and it too is slated for conversion to native forest.
"They call Molokai the Friendly Isle," says Cooke, who now at 80 is deeply involved in conservation efforts on the island, including serving as president of the Molokai Land Trust and supporting the work of The Nature Conservancy of Hawaii. "I think we should call it the Conservation Island. I think there is more conservation [per square mile] going on here than anywhere else in the world."
Cooke is proud of a recently completed predator-proof fence installed at Mokio to protect a hundred-acre area for nesting shearwaters. The fence is part of the Molokai Land Trust's Anapuka Dune restoration and preserves many endemic plants and animals. "It's the most state-of-the-art predator-proof fence in the entire state of Hawaii. There have been significant advances in terms of the mesh and the stainless-steel top that they use," says Cooke, who's optimistic—especially since shearwaters have already returned—that the fence, along with the site's remoteness, will protect native species.
Since he became involved with conservation on Molokai, nothing has made Cooke happier than The Nature Conservancy's work at Moomomi Preserve. "In my memory there is no more positive or more exciting sort of news than what has happened at Kaiehu Point, the main point preserve. It was only in the early 2000s when they noticed the first shearwater nest there. Now I think it's around three thousand nests," he says. "I was just there a couple days ago, and it was shocking to see how many more nests have come. It is the most intact dune ecosystem in the Pacific. You've never seen so much akiaki (seashore rush grass) and the whole ecosystem that goes with it."
Maybe all this is, in part, a response to a Beatle's critique, to be life-affirming rather than destroying. "No matter what I do in my life, I'll always be Bungalow Bill," Cooke says. "John Lennon witnessed a major, almost miraculous change in my life. Afterward, I went from India to Thomson's Falls, in Kenya's Central Rift Valley, where I did a little bit more hunting, but I'd outgrown my passion for it and ended my hunting career. I stayed in Africa until I ran out of money, just camping and photographing. The photography that I did there was far more dangerous than anything I did with hunting."
