‘I love humans – it gives me the courage to approach them’: the disarming work of Mao Ishikawa

For five decades the Japanese photographer has captured the internal lives of a host of unlikely subjects, from dockers to Black GIs. Now a new show celebrates an artist dedicated to documenting the underdog

In 1975, when Mao Ishikawa was in her early 20s, she took a& job in a bar frequented by Black American GIs stationed at Camp Hansen, in Okinawa. She had grown up hating the Americans who controlled her home island and, to this day, maintain military bases there. Yet she found kindred spirits among the soldiers and her fellow barmaids, with whom she lived and loved and also photographed. These images became her first major documentary series, Red Flower: The& Women of Okinawa, and capture a& sense of their youthful freedom and outsider bonhomie, from the group of men and women hanging out in bed to the trio hitting the town for a night out, the women’s hair teased into afros, massive hoop earrings glinting.

Like much of what you can discover in Ishikawa’s first UK survey, spanning her five-decade career – from dockworkers to travelling actors or downtown Philadelphia’s African American community – these are natural, intimate photographs of a hidden world that could only have been taken by an insider. They are an act of political resistance, too.