Today, when we say something is "sublime," we're often thinking casually — of beauty, of a sensation so exquisite it overwhelms.

That usage could certainly describe internationally renowned photographer Richard Misrach's sand- and oceanscapes, selected from his 2002-05 "On the Beach" series, and on view now at The Contemporary Museum at Makiki Heights; they are undeniably exquisite.

It would be wrong, though, to associate a purely casual sense of the sublime with this show, despite an alluring publicity image that presents beachgoers voyeuristically, from above, gathered on a crowded, sunlit strip of beach. That image recalls the light feeling most sunbathers experience lying on hot sand or floating in cool water. Such ease has to do with beauty and simple pleasure, and with tight social systems forged by a crowded planet and necessary human interdependence.

But while golden tans and bright towels may drive traffic to the show, and seem representative of what it's like to elbow in for a slice of paradise on any given Sunday at, say, Kaimana Beach, such images lack the terrific post-paradisical potency found elsewhere (and predominantly) in "On the Beach."

Historically, the word sublime has meant more than its contemporary usage implies; it positioned the human being — frail, vulnerable, small, isolated — in an enormous, perhaps indifferent, even terrifying universe. That's the sublime that William Wordsworth famously detailed in 1799: "In my thoughts there was a darkness — call it solitude or blank desertion ... but huge and mighty forms that do not live like living men moved slowly through my mind by day, and were the trouble of my dreams."

It's impossible to take in Misrach's large-scale color photographs of tiny people enveloped by vast, horizonless landscapes without recalling that full sense of the sublime, and all its ominous, historical associations. These photos singe; they trouble. There's an unease here, a terrible, haunting sense of a universe lost to, or beyond, human comprehension — a loss arguably more acute to the contemporary mind.

For "On the Beach," Misrach applies strategies — scale, abstraction, archetypal forms — that he's honed in such previous series as his surreal "Desert Cantos" to create uneasy post-apocalyptic images that both frame and brilliantly transcend the historical moment (in this case, the post-9/11 American consciousness) that inspired them.

Here, for example, are lovers wrapped in each other — as much, it appears, for protection as for physical comfort. They seem isolated together, whether on sand, limbs intertwined, or cinematically solemn and submerged cheek-to-cheek in cold gray shimmering ocean. Their need is greater than lust.

And here also are solitary figures, several backfloating alone and oblivious in disorienting vast planes of water — or closer to the shoreline, nearly washed in; one has beached like a seal, having unconsciously made a sand-angel pit where he lies. There is another lone man, jeans half-unbelted, white towel or T-shirt like a bandage over his eyes, lying on the beach in the long light of morning or evening, his flat form casting its own eerie shadow. In this and other images throughout the show, a prone stance, eyes closed, accentuates human vulnerability against natural and unnatural forces.

Such images' unsettling appearance of death or danger amid so much sparkling beauty recalls both archetypal imagery (the drowned woman, as in Ophelia from Shakespeare's "Hamlet") and disturbing modern journalistic imagery (torture, bloated bodies). While certain images, such as the Ophelia pose, become a bit redundant, and others, like the casual beach groupings, are less potent, some are so stunning that to miss them alone would be missing not a thousand words, but a thousand shows.

Seem excessive? Try not to be darkly seduced, for example, by the image of five figures making their way out of the water, their movements labored against the ocean's weight. Again, archetypes arise: evolution, diaspora, disaster.

In the end, an abstract is the show's most unsettling piece, and could be its signature image — if only the abstract's power did not rely partly on its association with the series' many haunting peopled images.

The scene is of a rippling ocean. But it is keyed greenish-black and stippled with what seems to be, improbably, sunlight. The dark water's implied depth and expanse is nothing short of horrible. In it is packed the entire historical weight of the sublime — something unforgettable to trouble your dreams, perhaps.