Wayne Levin was born in Los Angeles in 1945, he moved to Hawaiʻi in 1968. He graduated with a BFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1979, and an MFA in 1982 from Pratt Institute. He returned to Hawaiʻi in 1983 and began an underwater photographic study of surfers, receiving a National Endowment for the Arts Photographers’ Fellowship for this work in 1984.
Between 1984 and 1987 he documented the Leprosy Settlement at Kalaupapa on Molokaʻi. This work culminated in the book, Kalaupapa: A Portrait in 1989. In 1987 Wayne accepted a two-year artist-in residency with the Ohio Arts Council at the Dayton Art Institute, during which time he worked on several photography projects, and taught classes in photography.
Upon finishing his residency Wayne returned to Hawaiʻi, relocating to Kona on the Island of Hawaiʻi. During the following years he received magazine assignments to photograph throughout the Pacific and Caribbean and further developed his reputation as a black and white underwater photographer. Wayne’s first book of his black and white underwaterwork, Through a Liquid Mirror, received the Hawaiʻi Book Publishers Association, Hawaiʻi Book of the Year award in 1997.
In recent years Wayne has continued to focus on depicting the underwater world in black and white. He has photographed sea life, surfers, canoe paddlers, free divers, swimmers, shipwrecks, seascapes and aquariums.
In short, he has attempted to depict as many aspects of the ocean as possible within the boundaries of the black and white genre.
In 2006, he received an Individual Artists Fellowship from the Hawaiʻi State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. In 2009, he was invited by NOAA to accompany a research cruise to the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, culminating in an exhibition at The Contemporary Museum at the First Hawaiian Center Gallery in Honolulu in 2010.
Wayne’s photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries including Tokyo Designer Space, Japan; New York University, Tisch School of Art Gallery, New York City; Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco; Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles; Rosenberg & Kaufman Fine Art, New York; Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, Virginia Beach; The National Museum of Sciences, Washington DC; The High Museum, Atlanta; The Dimbola Museum, UK; The Datz Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea; and the American Pavilion at the World’s Fair, Japan.
Major public collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Photographic Art, San Diego; The Maritime Museum, Newport News, Virginia; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; and the Hawaiʻi State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. His work has been published in Aperture, American Photographer, Camera Arts, Photo Japan, and LensWork, among others.
In 2023, a beautiful new book, Mountains and Clouds, The Koʻolau has been published by Datz press. Datz Museum in Korea is exhibiting the work from Mountains and Clouds, along with Bryant Austin’s beautiful photography of Whales.
Wayne showed his latest color underwater work, The Edge, in conjunction with Val Kim’s powerful photography. “Imagine Water” was shown in February 2024 at Loʻi Gallery in Honolulu. Most recently, the Downtown Art Center in Honolulu exhibited: Wayne Levin, A Life in Photography. A Retrospective 1965–2024.