Introduction Once, art was an integral part of everyday life for people. The ways we saw our world and each other has been a subject of interpretation by art makers for as long as modern humans have walked the earth. Today, in many of our communities, the connection between art and daily life has dissolved. Art has become the hood ornament on a Cadillac of culture, careening through our communities – a symbol for the good taste of an elite – mimicking originality, and marketing familiar, overworked clichés as commodities. Galleries and critics are the big game hunters who have driven the real human connection which once tempered art, into obscurity. Art of people, by people, for people teeters on the brink of extinction. In the center of the immense Pacific, stand these Hawaiian Islands, a model for a world grown smaller. Our endemic culture offers interpretation of existence on this volcanic outpost, in story, song, dance and utilitarian object. Adventurers, explorers, colonizers, and proselytizers, from cultures around the world have overlaid that interpretation with their imprint. While art remains prolific in our island community, its nature is fractured. There is little consensus and only marginal involvement of the arts in the tasks of daily life, offering visions of the world we see, and bridges to new worlds that might be. The camera is an eye, recording momentary consciousness in eye-blink images. There is little guile, cunning or seduction behind which the photographer might hide. The first image we are born to identify is the face. As an icon, we come to know its expression more than any other image in our world. The faces of our community surround us, narrating intention, experience and emotion. In Faces of Hawaii, we have invited the inhabitants of these islands to create a portrait of themselves though the lens of a camera. We hope the totality is a moving picture of the many faces which comprise the single face of our small world, Hawaii. Stephen Freedman