Mao Ishikawa "Red Flower" （Kondaya Genbei）

Mao Ishikawa "Red Flower"

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Artists

Mao Ishikawa

Born in 1953 in Ōgimi village, Okinawa Prefecture. Ishikawa began her photography career in the 1970s, studying under Shōmei Tōmatsu at the WORKSHOP School of Photography in 1974. Working primarily in Okinawa, she creates deeply personal, immersive photographic works focusing on the people of Okinawa. In 2011, Ishikawa received the Sagamihara Photography Award for FENCES, OKINAWA, and in 2019, she was honoured with the Photographic Society of Japan Photography Lifetime Achievement Award. Her works have been widely exhibited both domestically and internationally and are included in the public collections of institutions such as the Okinawa Prefectural Museum and Art Museum, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, the Yokohama Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the United States. In 2024, she received The Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology's Art Encouragement Prize and the 43rd Ken Domon Award.

At KYOTOGRAPHIE 2025, Mao will present her earliest work Red Flower, The Women of Okinawa, which captures the love stories between men and women and the atmosphere of Okinawa in the late 1970s, taken while working at a bar where only Black soldiers, who were discriminated against among U.S. military personnel, gathered. Additionally she will present her ongoing latest project, in which she continues to photograph the people she loves dearly on a remote island in Okinawa.