OKINAWA!! ─ Victoire Thierrée

A photobook bringing together two photographic series that reflect on occupation, recovery and the layered temporality of Okinawa.

OKINAWA!! is a photobook by French artist Victoire Thierrée. Thierrée first encountered Okinawa through the work of photographer Shomei Tomatsu when she visited Japan for the first time in 2012. Tomatsu was among the first photographers to document the American military presence in Okinawa, culminating in his 1969 photobook Okinawa Okinawa Okinawa.

Returning to Okinawa in 2019, Thierrée photographed the areas surrounding the island’s thirty-two US military bases in vertical 6×9 black-and-white format. What she found was a landscape in which nature seemed to be quietly resisting occupation, slowly reclaiming ground. This series later led her to the Smithsonian archives in Washington in 2023, where she researched the work of botanist Egbert H. Walker and his postwar “Servicemen’s Collecting Program,” through which more than 8,000 plant specimens were gathered from Okinawa in 1951. From this archive, Thierrée selected forty herbarium specimens and rephotographed them in black and white. The resulting book places these two bodies of work in dialogue, opening a quiet conversation between past and present, record and nature, occupation and renewal.

Book Review
OKINAWA 1969–2025
Through the Eyes of Two Photographers
by Yukihito Kono

—

Title: OKINAWA!!
Artist: Victoire Thierrée
Publisher: RVB Books, 2025
Format: Hardcover
Size: 230 × 335 mm
Pages: 120
Language: English / French
Edition: First edition
ISBN: 978-2-492175-57-2