Red Flower, The Women of Okinawa

Red Flower, The Women of Okinawa, is the first United States monograph by Okinawan photographer Mao Ishikawa. Red Flower consists of 80 black & white 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Okinawa, primarily from Ishikawa’s first book Hot Days in Camp Hansen by A-man Shuppan in 1982, but it also includes unpublished work from the same period.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. Okinawa has been one of the most popular subjects in the history of Japanese photography, having attracted many renowned Japanese photography masters such as Shomei Tomatsu, Daido Moriyama, Nobuyoshi Araki, and Keizo Kitajima.

Red Flower features full-bleed images in a large format with intense black and white printing, and successfully makes the original lively spirit and tension of Ishikawa’s legendary Camp Hansen work available again for wider public appreciation.