Red Flower, The Women of Okinawa

Red Flower: The Women of Okinawa is the first US monograph by the Okinawan photographer Mao Ishikawa. It is a black-and-white record of women she befriended while working in bars near American military bases in the mid-1970s.

Session Press published it in 2017 and issued a second printing in 2022. The book gathers 80 photographs made between 1975 and 1977 in Koza and Kin. Most come from Ishikawa’s first book, Hot Days in Camp Hansen (A-man Shuppan, 1982), and some had not been published. Five chapters of pictures follow the women through their days: talking about men, working the bar, receiving boyfriends at home, spending time at the beach, and raising children. Ishikawa’s own essay closes the book, translated by Jun Sato. It is a 112-page softcover designed by Studio Lin, with full-bleed images in heavy black and white. Ishikawa worked as a server in the bars for two years and had relationships with men she met there. Session Press credits that involvement for the directness of the pictures.

Ishikawa was born in Okinawa in 1953 and has photographed people there for more than forty years. She attended Shomei Tomatsu’s class at the WORKSHOP school in 1974, and her Okinawa work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Session Press notes that Camp Hansen was not wholly hers. Toyomitsu Higa made the pictures in its second half, and the book was banned shortly after release following complaints from two of the women in it. Her later books include Okinawa Soul (Ota Publication, 2002) and Morika (miraisya, 2014).