Bad Ass and Beauty—One Love

The 2021 monograph Bad Ass and Beauty—One Love surveys fifteen photographic series by Okinawan photographer Mao Ishikawa, published by T&M Projects to mark her first solo museum exhibition.

The book coincided with that exhibition at the Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum, held March 5 through June 6, 2021. It brings together photographs from across her career alongside essays and interviews, printed in Japanese and English. It includes the essay "Akabanaa as a Beginning" by Fumiko Nakamura.

Ishikawa was born in 1953 in Ogimi, Okinawa. She studied photography in Tokyo in 1974 at the Workshop Shashin Gakko under Shomei Tomatsu. Her career has centered on the women, performers, and soldiers around Okinawa's U.S. military bases, often photographed from within their own community, and her later series addressed the military presence more directly. Her work has appeared at the Yokohama Museum of Art and MoMA PS1. She received the Photographic Society of Japan's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019. Her other books include Red Flower: The Women of Okinawa (Session Press, 2017) and Hot Days in Okinawa (FOIL, 2013).