shashasha

A tremendous survey of one of Okinawa’s most important photographers

Since the beginning of her career, Okinawa artist Mao Ishikawa has used her photography to depict the lives of people, their struggles as individuals in society, and the raw power of being alive. This publication – published to coincide with Ishikawa’s first solo exhibition at the Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum (March 5 – June 6, 2021) – features photographs from all fifteen of her series as well as essays and interviews. The book reveals Ishikawa’s deep love that allows her to capture human history through images, open in all directions, like the ocean surrounding Okinawa.

“She presents subjects as they are, without easily alienating them as abstractions of narrative or metaphor. She avoids seeing the realities in front of her along an axis of opposition and relativism. Furthermore, she even transforms her own identiy in relation to that which she encounters.”
— from Fumiko Nakamura’s essay “Akabanaa as a Beginning”

All texts included in Japanese and English translation.