Who are you?
I am this landscape.
Who are you?
I am this sound.
Who are you?
I am this fragrance.
Who are you?
I am this pain.
Who are you?
Society.
Who are you?
History.
Who are you?
I am you.
Who am I?
You are me. And someone I can never know.
You come to this place and go from this place.
I stand tall before the universe (human being). The universe before my eyes is connected to the world by two feet. The world stretches out as far as the eye can see in front of me and behind me. And the world in multiple layers is also connected to the universe. When the world was born, what happened in the universe? When a baby stands up, what happens in the world? All of its strength is put into trembling knees; hazy consciousness is steadied with both hands. In those hands with pulsing wrists is countless time. Deep consciousness impossible to see in its entirety with only two eyes. An infinite being compressed into 1.4 kilograms of brain matter and the coincidences and contradictions born from it. A universe that doesn't cross paths with a constantly moving world.
For everyone, existence is a solitary universe of life that is gradually erased. Stand among these eraser shavings that whirl up like stardust and it is ephemeral to ask what beauty is, futile to ask what freedom is, meaningless to ask what rightness is. Just, solely, only. Simply. I search for the art of living life. I am myself.

(Blow from Ryuichi Ishikawa)

Ryuichi Ishikawa is an Okinawan's Okinawan- Much like his home islands, his work has a wild streak that seems out of synch with the rest of mainland Japan. This is in fact a very good thing- for his ongoing documentation of his homeland could not be done as vividly, surely, or with as much raw love, had the project been taken on by an outsider from Tokyo.

This follow-up to his Kimura Ihee award-winning book Okinawan Portraits 2010-2012 picks up directly where the last one left off. This new entry features some 268 images which lead viewers on a winding journey through a world unique to these islands. It's inhabitants shine in Ishikawa's photographs- his steady gaze is as much about celebration as it is truth. Okinawa, and by extension Okinawans, aren't sentimentalized within these pages- nor are they sanitized. No matter what struggles these people have faced- whether self-inflicted or from birthright, their dignity is kept intact. The people and places shown in Ishikawa's pictures are the product of an environment and society that's inherited a historical legacy. The effects of seventy-plus years of Americanization can be seen everywhere- from designs painted on sunbaked walls to glowing fast food franchise signage, to the fashions and even faces of the citizens themselves. These pictures deftly portray a society that, despite having been stretched and battered by the East and West, continues to glower with a fiercely independent spirit.

Certainly Okinawan Portraits reflects photographic methods which are deeply woven into the tapestry that makes up the craft's history- within the pages of this book one can find visual threads that reach back to photography's past age (Think August Sander to Alec Soth) to new chapters that reach forward into the contemporary world of online street-fashion blogs and the infinite visual sea that is Instagram. Ishikawa's portraits however aren't mere decoration or a collection of "characters" to feed an online viewership- the people within these pages are alive and it's because of their flaws and beauty for which the photographer resolutely devotes himself to them. They are his, and he is theirs. The camera seals this fact with a snap of the shutter.

MOMA curator, critic, and photographer John Szarkowski once remarked that importance in a photographic work is only measured by what subsequent artists make of it- the reverberations of Ishikawa's Okinawan masterpiece will no doubt continue to have lasting effects in the ongoing visual dialogue of documentary portraiture.