Explore Our Image Collections

About the ArtistJuliette May Fraser was born in Honolulu in 1887, during the reign of King Kalakaua when Hawaii was a kingdom. She graduated from Honolulu’s Punahou School in 1905 and earned a bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College in 1909. She was a painter, muralist, printmaker and illustrator, and even designed a half-dollar coin for the U.S. Treasury in 1928 to commemorate Hawaii’s Sesquicentennial.  Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art and state collections in Hawaii and California. She began painting murals in Hawaii in the 1920s and learned the technique for frescoes…

In summer of 1966, Joan Griffis was recruited by the National Association of Broadcasters to work as an on-air teacher in American Samoa. For the next two years, she worked in Pago Pago, American Samoa, teaching English as a second language, with her lessons being broadcast to high schools on all of the American Samoan islands. She then spent an additional two years at the Feleti Teacher Training school—later the American Samoan Community College—where she and a small staff worked closely with Samoan high school students, helping them prepare for college on the mainland, while also conducting teacher training classes. In 1970, she returned to the continental United States. Over the…

The Save Our Surf (SOS) digital collection consists of unpublished material from the SOS organization - an environmental, social, political, and cultural movement that contributed to the contemporary Hawaiian Sovereignty movement. Note: Copyright is retained by the creators of these materials, their descendants, or the repository if copyright has been signed over, as stipulated by United States copyright law. It is the responsibility of the user to determine any copyright restrictions, obtain written permission, and pay any fees necessary for the reproduction or proposed use of the materials.

The Hawaiian and Pacific Collections have a substantial collection of large-format photographic negatives created as a result of requests for publication quality reproductions of book illustrations housed in our rare collection. These include plates from the 18th/19th century voyaging accounts, early 20th century ethnographic accounts and other texts. In addition to these photographic negatives, the Collections on occasion produce digital copies of similar material. This online collection gathers together images from these various sources, and is meant to allow for research across a variety of visual topics.

About Pat Saiki (1930- ) Patricia “Pat” Fukuda was born a third generation Japanese American in Hilo, Hawaiʻi on May 28, 1930 and graduated from Hilo High School in 1948. She earned a B.S. degree from the University of Hawaiʻi in 1952, working her way through college as a flight attendant, babysitter, and sales clerk.  She was a teacher in Honolulu from 1956 to 1968 at Punahou School, Kaimuki Intermediate School and Kalani High School.  She married Stanley M. Saiki, a physician, and they had five children—Stanley, Jr., Sandra, Margaret, Stuart and Laura. Beginning in the 1960s, Saiki held several offices in the Hawaiʻi Republican Party and was a member of…

In 2002, the library acquired the Hawaiian music collection of Dirk Vogel, who had been collecting Hawaiian music since the 1920s. The collection contains 6,000 78s, 2,650 LPs, 900 45s and thousands of other items.Also in 2002, the library received a bequest of 2,533 Hawaiian music recordings from the estate of James Grant Cathro of Glasgow, Scotland, who died in 1999. Mr. Cathro collected the recordings, with special interest in steel guitar music, over the course of many years. This collection contains 2,056 phonodiscs (33-1/3, 45 and 78 RPM speeds); 236 cassettes and various other recordings. The Vogel and Cathro collections serve as the foundation of the Hawaiian Music Collection, which…

The Joseph Singer Collection is comprised of a sampling of the artist's black and white photographs and prints documenting many of Hawaiʻi's sacred places and a sampling of his experimental prints. Some of the works are alternate views of images for his book with Jan Becket.Joseph M. Singer (1918-2010) was born in Pittsburgh and earned chemistry and chemical engineering degrees at the University of Pittsburgh. He made a career with the U.S. Bureau of Mines and moved to Hawaiʻi in the early 1980s when he retired. In his undergraduate days, he also studied drawing and photography, with some of his work shown in exhibitions. He rekindled his interest in art at the University of Hawaiʻi when…

With a magnitude of 7.9 on the Richter scale it was the deadliest earthquake in Japanese history, and at the time was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in the region. The Great Kanto Earthquake 関東大震災写真集 site contains 199 images, which were scanned from black & white still photos matted on a black background. The album may be supplemental materials to the publication: The Great earthquake of September 1st, 1923: a record from the reports of the "Japan Chronicle" of the destruction of Yokohama and Tokyo and the other ravages wrought. Kobe: Japan Chronicle Office. OCLC: 768291265. The report has been digitized and accessible from the National Library of Australia…

Korean War, conflict between the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) in which at least 2.5 million persons lost their lives. The war reached international proportions in June 1950 when North Korea, supplied and advised by the Soviet Union, invaded the South. The United Nations, with the United States as the principal participant, joined the war on the side of the South Koreans, and the People’s Republic of China came to North Korea’s aid. After more than a million combat casualties had been suffered on both sides, the fighting ended in July 1953 with Korea still divided into two hostile states. Negotiations in 1954 produced no…

Henry P. Edmunds and William A. Bryan were both photographers of the early 20th century. Although they lived very different lives, they shared the experience of Rapanui, or Easter Island, during the early 1900s. Each took remarkable photographs documenting Rapanui's archaeological wonders and everyday life, several of which are presented here.For more information about the photographers, the provenance of this collection click here.  A glossary is also available.In addition to the University of Hawai'i Library's holdings, Honolulu's Bishop Museum also has an extensive collection of Henry P. Edmunds' photographs.