Photographer Sergio Goes’ legacy captures a visual voice

DOWNTOWN—It may seem, at first, strange that The Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts’ Curatorial Coordinator would come all the way to Hawaii to curate an exhibition so focused on the work of an artist who so brilliantly captured the singular, yet diverse, beauty of these islands and the people that live here. But Watsuki Harrington explains the deep connection she has to the work of Sergio Goes.

Harrington is the curator of the Sergio Goes: The Seer and the Spectacle exhibition, opening Friday at the Peggy Chun Gallery in Chinatown. Goes died tragically in 2008 while photographing and training with free-divers off of Waikiki.

“I used Sergio’s work for my thesis,” Harrington explains over the phone from her home back east. She grew up on the Big Island, and performed with accomplished dancer and acrobat Andrea Torres, with whom Goes had a child. Harrington was the maid of honor when Goes and Torres were wed.

Harrington also used Goes’ work for an exhibition in Philadelphia—images with urban themes that she says “help debunk the myth of Hawaii as just a paradise.”

In addition to being a master technician of light and composition, Goes was an award winning film documentarian. His documentary Black Picket Fence, a stark examination of bleak realities faced by aspiring rap artists in the streets of Brooklyn, New York, received awards from the Charles Guggenheim Center for Documentary Film and the Brooklyn International Film Festival in 2002.

Goes was an outspoken proponent and ardent supporter of the Chinatown Arts District, and the legacy that he left behind continues to help the arts in Chinatown thrive.

“Sergio was a lot of things,” says Chris Kahunahana, who operates Nextdoor. “He always had a project going.”

Goes and Kahunahana founded the Honolulu Underground Film Festival in the early 90s, which later became the Cinema Paradise independent film festival. And his involvement was pivotal in the opening of Nextdoor, which currently enjoys a large attendance of independent music and film fans in Chinatown.

“I miss him as a creative partner,” says Kahunahana.

The eloquence with which Sergio Goes’ photographs captured the indescribable beauty of the islands and the intrinsic vitality of its people amounted to a visual voice—immediate, clear, and authoritative. His work for Honolulu Magazine won him a Society of Professional Journalists award in 2008.

Friday’s opening of the exhibition, which runs until October 9, will not only honor the artist and his work, it will serve to continue his legacy, one that has become a part of the place that he loved.

Sergio Goes: The Seer and the Spectacle exhibition opening
Friday, September 17 from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m
Peggy Chun Gallery
1161 Nuuanu Avenue
(808) 545-4810