The gentle sound of lapping waves mingles with woozy notes from a distant steel guitar as a fruity cocktail beckons — paradise, right?

Not everyone’s.

Betsy Karel has a fraught relationship with Waikiki, where she went with her husband, Frank, knowing it would be their last vacation together. Frank Karel was terminally ill. After he died, not long after they returned to Washington, she made her way back to Hawaii, hoping to distract herself by making pictures. But as she roamed the beaches and tourist shops, the pictures weren’t materializing. She couldn’t dine in familiar restaurants or sleep in the usual hotels. At one point, she realized she was subconsciously photographing couples and little else.

“This is so sick,” she recalled saying to herself. “I had to separate myself from it.”

A photographer friend helpfully put things into perspective when she reached a low point: “He said to me, ‘Listen Betsy, think of it as war photography with room service.’ ”

And so her series, called “Conjuring Paradise” (Radius Books, 2013), with its garish colors, comical characters, or its close-up of nachos so close that you feel you need to wipe your face clean after looking at it (Slide 16), appears at first to be an implosion of notions of the sublime. Ms. Karel trains her eye on a few aspects of what is universally acknowledged as an American Eden — a place that is simultaneously the epitome of sandy relaxation and a huckster’s heaven that frantically tries to cash in on that idea by pasting paradisaical images on every available surface.

But she’s not out to indict Waikiki’s tourism industry or anybody’s idea of fun. These pictures aren’t sarcastic. Nor was she judgmental, Ms. Karel insisted. As she wandered around on multiple trips to Hawaii, walking and watching, she began to understand that everybody has a different notion of paradise.

“So you know that, for that person who’s eating the shaved ice in his Hawaiian shirt — he’s in paradise,” she said (Slide 5). Or the gentleman with argyle socks on the curved balcony, white slippers nearby, at the ready — is that not what bliss might look like?

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In fact, though some might think this was a jaundiced view of Hawaii’s primrose promises, Ms. Karel and her husband bought into it themselves. On that last visit, Frank’s symptoms receded like the tide; his pain disappeared and, as Ms. Karel writes in the afterword, “Disease no longer defined our lives.” Though they were as seduced by visions of palm trees, daiquiris and surf as anyone else, it genuinely did the trick, and the Karels were eager to embrace the illusion.

“That’s why people come, they’re in this place where life doesn’t claim truth — it’s this manufactured dreamscape,” she said. “The reality is that for us the burdens of Frank’s disease, that was the foremost in our minds while we were there.” And that dreamscape, manufactured as it was, offered respite, “and for that I’ll always be grateful,” Ms. Karel said.

“Conjuring Paradise,” Ms. Karel’s first work in color and her first foray into digital photography, begins with the only image taken while Frank was still alive (below). “It was the balcony; he spent his days sitting out there with his writing and he loved it there,” she said. Her husband’s version of paradise, the Hawaii he loved, Ms. Karel acknowledged, was not quite the one she captures in her book.

“His Hawaii was a much smaller world,” she said.

Ms. Karel hasn’t returned to Hawaii since concluding her project and has no plans to. But she can seek transcendence anywhere, should she choose. “Paradise, for me,” she writes in her afterword, “is a state of mind: an illusion embraced both skeptically and gratefully.”

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