“I enjoy getting to know people. I think my photos are the result of it. It’s just not planned. It all depends on the encounter.”

—Mao Ishikawa

Between 1975 and 1977, Okinawan photographer Mao Ishikawa (b.1953), then in her early 20s, worked in a bar that catered to African-American soldiers stationed in Koza City and Kin Town in Okinawa and began documenting the lives of her fellow barmaids and the women who frequented the bar. Ishikawa’s diaristic, unapologetically honest photographs of the joyful moments, nights out, friendships and love affairs shared among her social circle culminated in her iconic series Red Flower. In the introduction to her seminal 2017 monograph Red Flower: The Women of Okinawa, she recalls:

‘I liked these bar girls who lived open and free in narrow, cramped Okinawa. I had never cared much about what others thought of me but their ethos of “Let’s, do what we want, and trust ourselves” made me care even less. There are those who look down on women who work at military bars. They assume that the women are prostitutes. That is a total misconception. The worst position is looking down on others, I want to take down those high horses. The bar girls were living their lives to the fullest. No one has the right to talk down on those lives. I love the women who loved black men. To me, these are the most important photographs that I took in my 20s, in the 1970s.’

Taken in Ishikawa’s house, the candid portrait, offered here, of a young woman with an afro hairstyle and visible tattoos is a key image of the series and was selected by the artist as the cover illustration for the photobook Red Flower. The artist remembers this woman, a regular at the military bar where she worked, as someone she admired for her uninhibited ways and for openly challenging social taboos. For Ishikawa, this portrait encapsulates the freedom of youth and the spirit of the women she met and befriended at that time in Okinawa.

Initially, Ishikawa turned to photography to question the heavy presence of US military in Okinawa in the aftermath of its return to Japanese sovereignty in 1972, but her focus soon shifted from photographing the American GIs to documenting the honest lives of her circle of female friends. These intimate photographs were first published in the 1982 book Hot Days in Camp Hansen. However, when two of the women objected to being portrayed in the book, Ishikawa removed those pages from nearly all copies and destroyed the negatives. The present lot is part of a trove of early Red Flower prints, presumed lost at the time, which then resurfaced almost 30 years later, resulting in the publication of Red Flower: The Women of Okinawa in 2017.

While Okinawa has been a favourite subject among Japanese photographers – Shōmei Tōmatsu, Daidō Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki, to name a few – Ishikawa is unique in that she was not only born and raised in Okinawa but also devoted more than 40 years to photographing the Okinawan people, making it her life’s work. Photographs from Red Flower reside in the following institutions: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; the Yokohama Museum of Art and The National Museum of Art, Osaka, which holds a modern print of the present image.

Video interview with Mao Ishikawa on Red Flower at the 2013 All You Need is Love exhibition at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Courtesy of the artist.