Red Flower - The Women of Okinawa /Akabana - Okinawa no onna

Mao Ishikawa
Red Flower - The Women of Okinawa /Akabana - Okinawa no onna

Photographs: Mao Ishikawa

Text: Mao Ishikawa

Publisher: Session Press

112 pages

Pictures: 80

Year: 2017

Comments: Silkscreen softcover, 330 x 229 mm. First edition, 2017. Black & white photographs. Silkscreen text pages. Text in japanese. Limited edition of 600 copies. New.

Red Flower, The Women of Okinawa is the first United States monograph by Okinawan photographer Mao Ishikawa. Red Flower consists of 80 b/w photographs that date from 1975 to 1977 in Koza and Kin, Okinawa, primarily from Ishikawa’s first book Hot Days in Camp Hansen by A-man Shuppan in 1982, but it also includes unpublished work from the same period. Red Flower exhibits Ishikawa’s celebration of the courageous and honest lives of women she met and befriended while working at military bars at a time when social and political tensions between the US and Japan were on high alert. It consists of five chapters of pictures, followed by her essay dedicated to the publication: girls gossiping about boys, working at bar, meeting their boyfriends at home, enjoying themselves at the beach, and their children for the future of Okinawa. Red Flower is the pivotal work for Ishikawa, since it marks the starting point of her subsequent long career as a photographer.