MAALAEA, Maui — Papahanaumokuakea is a rallying point for all sides in a resurrected debate about the earth’s largest conservation area’s designation as a national monument.

Measured against barbs flying from Washington to Hawaii and back again, a photo exhibit of the marine sanctuary on display at the Maui Ocean Center is worth a million words.

“I always wanted to do something socially useful, but there is also the artist in me,” said Susan Middleton, who along with fellow photographer David Liittschwager produced the exhibit. “I didn’t understand evolution until I got to Hawaii, where you can actually see evolution if you are guided by scientists and scientific studies.

Courtesy of Susan Middleton

“When I got to Hawaii I felt like the native species could use a little help in the PR department. I’ve spent parts of 15 to 20 years in Hawaii so I feel very connected to it now.”

Middleton commented during a phone interview from the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Marine Laboratories on San Juan Island, where she continues her research of marine invertebrates.

Maui Ocean Center’s 32 vibrant color prints taken by Middleton and Liittschwager in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands — some 4 feet square — send viewers’ imaginations soaring as they stand eye-to-eye with fantastical sea creatures such as the chocolate chip sea cucumber, blue dragon nudibranch and Triton’s trumpet.

Captured in life cycle from birth to death are the black-footed albatross, brown booby and great frigatebird, species that mate and nest on the 10 small islands and atolls. Images of threatened green sea turtles and endangered Hawaiian monk seals are audience favorites.

When President Barack Obama issued a proclamation under the Antiquities Act a year ago that quadrupled the reserve to more than a half-million square miles, expansionists thought the fight to secure a buffer zone for the environmentally fragile site was won.

Courtesy of David Liittschwager and Susan Middleton

But President Donald Trump reopened the issue in April when he ordered the Interior Department to review Papahanaumokuakea and more than two dozen other national monuments, including the Marianas Trench and Pacific Remote Islands reserves.

The public comment period for the 27 national monuments under review ends Monday. But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently opened up a new review and comment period that’s specific to marine reserves and narrower in scope.

It includes Papahanaumokuakea, the Pacific Remote Islands, Rose Atoll and eight other reserves designated or expanded since April 28, 2007. This review stems from Trump’s executive order implementing his America-First Offshore Energy Strategy, which is looking at opening up protected ocean areas to wind farms and mining for oil, natural gas and methane hydrates. The deadline for public comments on this review is July 26.

Trump’s order to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke included a provision to find out if if local communities located near the monuments want more input about restrictions, especially those that keep “traditional uses” such as fishing off-limits.

Papahanaumokuakea has few inhabited outposts. Assigned scientific personnel and strictly monitored visitors rotate in and out. Midway, once a major military installation that brought more than 10,000 people to the atoll in the 1950s and 60s, now has fewer than 50 occupants and is overseen by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife.

Courtesy of David Liittschwager and Susan Middleton

Major quarantine precautions aimed at preventing contamination of the vast and vulnerable ocean and island environment are required. The nearest “local” communities to Papahanaumokuakea are the state’s six heavily populated islands 1,200 miles to the southeast.

“Its distance protects it,” said Middleton, who made her first trip to Laysan Island in 1999. “It is very hard to go there, the currents are difficult, there are no commercial flights.”

Middleton and Liittschwager underwent special medical training and inspections to prevent carrying in biological hitchhikers as they traveled around the refuge on research ships. Some of that 1999 work was included in “Remains of a Rainbow: Rare Plants and Animals of Hawaii,” published in 2001 by the National Geographic Society.

But during that trip “we realized we needed to spend more time there,” Middleton said. “The marine monument has 70 percent of the country’s coral reefs. It is home to the endangered Laysan duck and Laysan finch. It deserved its own book.”

In 2003-2004, the photographers returned 11 times. Working in extreme elements and primitive conditions, they shot 2,873 rolls of film, took portraits of more than 250 species, wrote essays about their adventures and created 150 profiles of diverse plants and animals for the 2005 book “Archipelago: Portraits of Life in the World’s Most Remote Island Sanctuary,” also published by the National Geographic Society.

They wrote that to be in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands “is to feel like a visitor in someone else’s home. They are owned by the wildlife – it is their place, not ours – even though human intervention is needed to ensure their protection.” As interlopers they were witnesses sharing “this national public treasure, while helping to create the awareness, appreciation, and collective action that will be critical to future generations.”

The Maui Ocean Center’s exhibit is Middleton and Liittschwager’s third show drawn from the archipelago photos. Similar exhibits hung in the U.S. Senate in 2016 and at the International Union for Conservation of Nature conference last September in Honolulu.

Tapani Vuori, the center’s general manager, said the center always planned to have a Papahanaumokuakea exhibit, and prior to Obama’s executive order sponsored a free “sea talk” with cultural practitioner Sol Kaho’ohalahala to gain support for the refuge’s expansion.

But Trump’s review of Obama’s action “was the catalyst that made Susan’s exhibit become a reality,” Vuori said at the exhibit.

Courtesy: David Liittschwager/Winged Ambassadors

“Marine debris is a global problem. We have a moral obligation to talk about this issue, and to lead by example. The current protection area increases Papahanaumokuakea’s buffer zone and is also good for commerce because it makes for healthier fisheries for the fishermen,” he said.

With additional help from the Pew Charitable Trust, the center’s design team led by Chris Masterson went from bare walls to the exhibit’s opening day in less than three weeks, a feat Middleton called “amazing.”

“We crashed it,” Masterson said. “Everybody on this team believed in the show and wanted to get it hung so as many people as possible can see it and leave their views and comments about the show, the monument, the video, and what they hope the future holds for Papahanaumokuakea.”

Vuori said the Middleton-Liittschwager show will remain on display “indefinitely.” The center provides paper books and also has installed an electronic kiosk linked to encourage visitors to express their views about the marine monuments.

Middleton, whose career began as an apprentice to Richard Avedon in New York in the mid-1980s, said she combines her love of portraiture with a desire to spotlight plants and animals. She and Liittschwager, also an Avedon protégé, began photographing endangered species together in 1986. They have collaborated on four books, including the two Hawaii volumes.

The Maui Arts & Cultural Center recently announced another Middleton exhibition is coming to its Schaefer International Gallery Aug. 6- Oct. 1.

In “Spineless: Portraits of Marine Invertebrates, The Backbone of Life,” the photographer turns her lens on relatively unknown animals without backbones that live beneath the ocean and are the foundation for all life on earth. The three fieldwork sites for “Spineless” were Papahanaumokuakea, the Line Islands of Palmyra, Kingman and Jarvis, and the Friday Harbor Marine Lab in Washington state.