IACK Conversations 01: Plants and the Memory of Occupation — A Conversation with Victoire Thierrée on Okinawa!!

Cover of "Okinawa!!" (RVB Books, 2025)©︎Victoire Thierrée

Encountering Shomei Tomatsu

Yukihito Kono (YK): Let’s begin with the starting point of this project. Is it correct to say that your interest in Okinawa began through the work of Shomei Tomatsu?

Victoire Thierrée (VT): Yes, exactly.

I discovered his work in 2013, when I first came to Japan. I was an intern at a photography gallery in Tokyo that worked with Shomei Tomatsu and now manages his estate. Tomatsu had just passed away when I arrived.

Because of that timing, there were many of his photobooks laid out on the table at the gallery. He was the first photographer I encountered in Japan. Okinawa, Okinawa, Okinawa in particular was a real shock.

Cover of "OKINAWA 沖縄 OKINAWA" (Shaken, 1969) ©︎Shōmei Tōmatsu

At the time, I was still very young, maybe around twenty-three. I was already interested in military territories, and I was working on that subject in France. So Okinawa was an extremely interesting subject and territory for me. But it took many years before I could actually make it into a work, precisely because I felt it was such an important place.

YK: So did you go to Okinawa several times to photograph?

VT: Actually, it took me seven years to return to Okinawa for this project.

First, I finished art school, and then I began thinking about the project. I am a little slow; a work needs to grow properly inside me. After that, I also had to find funding for the production. In the end, I received a public grant from France, which allowed me to go to Okinawa and develop the project.

I photographed there only once, in September 2019. I stayed between two typhoons.

Taking Distance from the Tradition of Documentary Photography

YK: Let’s first talk about the photobook.

This work is composed of photographs taken around U.S. military bases and photographs of plant specimens held in the Smithsonian archives.

The grainy texture of the black-and-white photographs reminded me somewhat of Shomei Tomatsu’s work. But while Tomatsu, in a sense, moves closer to his subjects and works in a more documentary, or even journalistic, manner, I felt that your photographs always maintain a certain distance.

There must have been many possible ways to photograph Okinawa. Why did you choose this particular approach?

VT: When I came to Japan for this project, I went to the library at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum and asked to see all the photobooks by Shomei Tomatsu. Because he used the locations as titles for his photographs, I made a list of those places. That became my map of Okinawa. I was alone, and I was also a little scared. I didn’t know whether this project was really a good idea or not.

So I started by entering into the GPS the places where Tomatsu had photographed around the bases.

I quickly felt that I wanted to photograph only in vertical format. In order to step away from the tradition of documentary photography, and also to move slightly away from Tomatsu’s extraordinary path, I needed to create a protocol, a set of rules for the act of photographing.

As a contemporary artist and photographer, I decided to focus on the vertical format. I was shooting with a 6×9 camera, and if I photographed horizontally, it would come too close to a postcard aesthetic. I wanted to avoid that.

I think the first three photographs were horizontal. But as soon as I saw them, I felt, “This isn’t going to work.” So I decided to photograph only vertically, and also only during the hours when the sun was at its highest, roughly between noon and 2 p.m. I wanted very hard light and strong contrast. I also pushed the film a little, trying to bring out the rough grain and black tones that are so important in the history of Japanese photography.

Spread from the book "Okinawa!!" ©︎Victoire Thierrée

That was a decision I made very quickly, in an environment that felt like fifty degrees Celsius and one hundred percent humidity. It was not planned in advance. But I strongly felt that I had to make decisions in order to move forward with the project in my own way.

I also decided not to photograph people. My stay was very short, and I didn’t feel that I could legitimately include people in the work.

The Smithsonian Archive and Plant Specimens

YK: How about the plant specimens?

VT: When I first came back from Okinawa, I had this series of photographs taken around the bases. When I sent the rolls to the lab in Tokyo and received the contact sheets, I was genuinely relieved. With film, you don’t know whether the camera was working properly. You don’t know whether everything worked. Even now, I think that is really crazy. I like photographing on film, but it is very bad for the heart.

I felt that I had captured something during that one stay and shoot, but I also felt that it was not enough. For a long time, I was thinking about whether I should go back to Okinawa, or whether I should photograph more U.S. military bases. But then I also asked myself: why would that be necessary?

Then, in 2023, I applied to a French artist residency program called Villa Albertine. I was accepted into this new program and went to the United States. I decided to go to Washington, D.C. to research a scientist, a botanist, who had collected plants in Okinawa from 1951 onward. He was collecting plants for the Department of the Army.

Just a few years after the war, they came to Okinawa and collected plants over a period of six years, making these beautiful herbarium specimens. I was given almost unrestricted access to them. What I found interesting was that the United States did not seem to see the violence contained in the process of collecting 6,000 plants in a place where only six years had passed since the war. The Battle of Okinawa was an extremely devastating battle that involved civilians. They had not been evacuated.

Everybody likes herbarium specimens. They have a kind of naive and beautiful aesthetic. So when beauty, ugliness, and violence exist in the same place, I am very interested in that. I am especially interested in things that first attract people, and then begin to speak about something a little darker. All my work is connected to that. The green cover design of this book, which attracts people, is part of the same idea.

I’m digressing a little, but when I contacted the archive, they said, “That’s fine, but please choose ten plants.” I replied, “No, I’m going to choose sixty” (laughs). From there, we began negotiating by email, and in the end I think we agreed on around thirty or forty. I don’t remember the exact number.

I made an appointment, and finally the door opened. I photographed there for three days. Two days before that, I had gone to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. to research the life of this botanist. There were only typed letters, but his whole life was there. I was like a detective, trying to understand this person. So I went to the archive with something like his state of mind in me, and photographed.

I used a 35mm camera. When I came back, I felt that I had the whole story: America and Japan through nature, and plants attached to paper.

When I saw the images in the archive database, I realized that the tape holding the plants in place would be very interesting to me in black and white, because it looked like cuts. When a plant was too large, thread was used, almost like stitching skin. I thought this was an incredible discovery for speaking about the subject.

The problem was choosing those thirty plants from among 6,000.

Spread from the book "Okinawa!!" ©︎Victoire Thierrée

The Photobook and the Exhibition

YK: I would like to ask about the exhibition and the photobook.

I saw the exhibition of this work in Kyoto recently, and it gave me a slightly different impression from the photobook. In the book, because of the structure of the object itself—with left and right pages and a border at the center—the binary opposition between the military photographs and the images of plant specimens or nature feels quite strong. In the exhibition, on the other hand, you showed very small prints in very classical frames. Because of that, I did not feel the binary opposition as strongly as in the book, and I also felt that the space between the photographs allowed for a freer reading.

How do you think about the difference between the exhibition and the photobook?

VT: The first thing I worked on for Okinawa!! was the photobook. I made it before doing any large exhibition of the project. I thought of the photobook as an independent object, with many meanings and secrets.

All the photographs taken in Okinawa are placed within white margins. This gives the photographs a kind of special status. On the other hand, the plant specimens are placed full page. The airplane photographs are also full page. This layout has to do with the fact that, at first, I had asked to access not the botanical collection, but the insect collection, the entomology section. But the Smithsonian did not grant me permission to photograph it.

I know that insects were brought back from Okinawa, and I wanted to photograph them. It is a completely different subject, but that was my first impulse. So, almost as a kind of revenge, I placed the military airplanes full page in the book, like insects, like plants.

Spread from the book "Okinawa!!" ©︎Victoire Thierrée

There are many layers in this book. The titles are also very important. Just as Shomei Tomatsu indicated the locations of his photographs, I decided to include the names of places and the Latin names of the plants in this book. If you Google the names of the plants, you can see the living plants. At the same time, in the book, you have the dead plants. You can also find out where the bases are. For me, all of that was important.

The green of the cover comes from materials by the botanist E.H. Walker. It comes from his life’s work, a book on the botany of the Ryukyu Islands. The cover of that book is dark green, and when you open it, a vivid green appears on the second page. When I saw it, I thought, “I’m going to do something with this green.” At the time, I had no idea what that would be. This was two or three years before the book was made.

When I spoke with RVB about the cover, I said, “I have an idea. Can we use this green for the cover?” The small dots on the cover come from an old map of Okinawa. They are the sea around the island. It is not perfect, but it also looks somehow like a poisonous plant, and that attracts people.

I wanted the cover to be glossy, because I wanted it to recall the humidity of Okinawa. It is also an homage to Nobuyoshi Araki’s 1992 photobook Erotos , which I really love. Erotos has this beautiful reddish-orange, almost sticky cover, and the inside is black and white. I showed it immediately and said, “This is the reference.”

But this was my first book, so to be honest, I had no idea where I was going. The publisher thought about the size. I didn’t know. It was too complicated for me.

For the title, the publisher asked a typographer to make proposals. The first proposals were close to Provoke , but I did not want it to be too close to Provoke . The title I eventually chose is, of course, also an homage to Shomei Tomatsu. But it is not Okinawa, Okinawa, Okinawa . It is Okinawa!! —a title like a scream.

I also did not want the book to begin with my own photograph. I did not want it to start with “I went there, I did this.” I did not want to put myself too much at the center. I wanted to add a layer of darkness.

The first image is one I found in an American propaganda book. It is a photograph of a flame tank. On the Internet, you can hardly find photographs of American flame tanks. It is as if they do not exist. In Okinawa, they were used many times, against nature and against people.

For me, it was important to begin with that subject. In the photograph itself, the flame tank is not very clearly visible. You only see a soldier and a large flame. For me, that is the point of view from which to look at the book. There is mystery, and there is also darkness. The caption is the actual caption that accompanied the archival photograph.

After that, my name and my work appear. But what comes first is the contrast between hell and paradise. For me, Okinawa is a place where paradise and hell coexist.

As for the exhibition, the first time I presented the Okinawa work was in France, in my first solo exhibition at a museum. The prints at that time were large gelatin silver prints, about two metres high. I also made the aluminum frames myself. That was how I first wanted to show this work.

For the exhibition in Kyoto, everything was different. It was not realistic to bring two-metre prints. I had to find a solution to the constraints of budget and space. So I thought I would bring the negatives for the time being.

Usually, I make prints with a printer, meaning I work with someone in a lab. But this time, that was impossible. So I brought the negatives, the chemicals, and the paper. It was almost like bringing an entire darkroom with me.

Benrido, the famous collotype printing company in Kyoto, told me through Villa Kujoyama, the residency program I was staying with, “We have a black-and-white lab that nobody knows about. You could use it.” That is how I became the first photographer to enter Benrido’s black-and-white photography lab.

But I had not printed my own photographs since art school. Since graduating, I had always worked with a printer. On one side, I was surrounded by Benrido’s extremely professional team; on the other, there was me in that situation. I was secretly checking, step by step, how to handle the chemicals on ChatGPT while I was printing (laughs).

In the end, though, the darkroom printing went well. I worked very hard and made forty prints myself. In the solo exhibition in Kyoto, I showed those forty unique prints. I think the reason why I made them small becomes clear if you consider the situation I have just described. As a result, it became a special exhibition made only for Kyoto.

I was very specific about the frames. I had trouble finding a good framer in Kyoto, and in the end I had them made in Tokyo by the person who does the framing for MISAKO & ROSEN. They are very close friends, and we have been working together for ten years.

For the mats, I wanted large margins around the photographs, like the paper of the plant specimens. The plants are attached to rather large sheets of paper. I also wanted a very particular deep grey. It must have been a rather difficult request for the framer, because we had to do many tests.

I consider this to be one coherent project, so at the moment I do not want to sell the works separately. I want to keep the set together and have it enter a museum or public collection as a single project.

YK: That is exactly how I felt. The small prints placed in mats with large margins looked like objects in themselves, almost like specimens.

Yuichi Akatsu, Begonias, and Layers of Reading

YK: Next, I would like to ask about the texts in the book.

In the book, there is a very interesting story about a begonia flower and a person named Yuichi Akatsu, a survivor of the Battle of Okinawa. Could you tell us a little about that story?

VT: There are two texts in the book. One is a short text that I wrote, which gives the general outline of the book and the project. The other is a text by my friend Jean-Yves Jouannais. He is a French writer, artist, and performer.

For fifteen years, he has been giving a monthly performance at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, speaking about war. There are no recordings, so if you don’t go and see it, it is over.

He is a very important person for me, both as an artist and intellectually. When I was making my first book, I asked him if he would write a text for it. I did not want to pay someone to write about me. In a way, I find that obscene. I did not want someone to write, “She is such a wonderful artist.” I simply told him, “Enjoy yourself, and write whatever you like.”

What is interesting about Jean-Yves’s work is that he is extremely well documented. His performance deals with war from Homer’s Odyssey up to 1945. I think he has read every book in the world on the subject. And at the same time, he invents fiction within facts. On stage, he tells us incredible facts, and sometimes he lies intentionally: to create distance, to add a kind of mad poetry, or to add something personal.

His text in this book also contains many things that are true, and things that are not actually true.

What was interesting was that we did not discuss the text at all. I read it for the first time only when it was finished. In it, he writes about Yuichi Akatsu, a boy who was in Okinawa during the Battle of Okinawa. The book he wrote after surviving the war is very important to me. So I was very happy that Jean-Yves mentioned him. I did not write about him in my own text. We had not spoken about it, but we shared the same reference and the same interest.

YK: When I first saw the book, especially as a Japanese person, I felt that it was a political work. Because it is a work about territory, I also felt a distance between the subjects and you.

But after reading this text, my impression of the book changed slightly. Jean-Yves writes that Akatsu made a pressed flower, and that it became a kind of talisman for him. When I read that, the plant specimens in the book, which originally have a violent background, suddenly began to look like pressed flowers placed inside the photobook.

And now, after hearing you speak about all of this, I also felt something in the work like a prayer directed from you toward Okinawa.

VT: I like to build many layers into my work.

Okinawa is a very special territory. I have just come back from Okinawa, and I feel that it will take me years to truly understand it. I am now beginning to meet people from Okinawa. It took time to get to that point, but it is very important in order to understand the territory from the heart.

The photographs are not exactly cold, but perhaps this has to do with the fact that the subject they deal with is so large. And that is something that runs through all of my work. Most of my work deals with military issues, the weapons industry, and military territories.

It is always difficult to speak about these subjects, in France or anywhere else. You have to speak about them delicately, but at the same time firmly.

I have been doing this for fifteen years now. As Jean-Yves said, it is an obsession. It is an obsession for him, and it is also an obsession for me. I think it will probably continue for my whole life.

So this book is about many things for me. And viewers can see in it whatever they want to see.

YK: Fifteen years?

VT: Yes. This time, too, the first thing I photographed was an airplane.

Photographing military aircraft is not easy. They are very fast, and you have to know where to stand. It may look as if I just happened to be getting coffee and accidentally photographed an F-22. But in reality, it is not like that.

The light is important, and the place is important. I was photographing in front of signs that said, “You are not allowed to stop here and photograph.” My feeling was, “I understand, but can I just have two minutes?”

I drove around Kadena Base, watching which aircraft were preparing to take off. Then, once I understood the direction of the wind, I drove like crazy to get to the right place. I knew they would not take off toward the sea, but in the opposite direction.

So I drove, stopped, slammed the door, and photographed.

As time passed, I came to understand everything, including the sounds. I can tell quite well when they are about to take off, and what model they are. The last time I went, I could not yet tell whether it was an F-35 or an F-22, but I knew how many aircraft there were. I was counting while photographing: “One, two, three, four…” Then I noticed that another one had started to move.

Ten aircraft took off. It was an unbelievable sight. I had never seen anything like it. It was like war.

Spread from the book "Okinawa!!" ©︎Victoire Thierrée

This is the result of fifteen years of obsession. For me, a fighter jet is an insect, a dangerous insect.

There is experience involved, there is a technical aspect, and there is also the fact of being there. And as a young French photographer photographing American military bases, which is not strictly allowed, you do not have much time to ask yourself too many questions.

So it is much more difficult than it looks.

Fiction, Literature, and Documentary Work

YK: May I ask one more question?

The other day, I had a talk with the American photographer Daniel Shea, and I asked him a similar question. His latest work, Distribution , includes a short story, and I felt there was a structural similarity in the way fiction is brought into realistic themes and materials.

What do you think about the power of combining fiction or literature with this kind of documentary work?

VT: I think it is interesting to tell stories, and to move away from the ego.

Many texts about artists are really boring, or very conceptual. I did not want to fall into that. By asking Jean-Yves, I knew that he would bring strong documentation and something more experimental.

With this subject, I also knew that he knew the Pacific War very well. So I had the feeling that I was asking someone who had the background, and who could also do something a little strange.

I like both. I like documentary films, and I also make films myself, but they always have a documentary aesthetic while being very experimental.

When I go into bases, I focus on strange things that one would not normally point the lens at. I am inside a base, and the images are taken in an actual military base. I may have had to do rather reckless things to get there with a team. But then I focus on something in a corner. People ask, “Why are you filming this?” and I think, “Why should that matter?” I am not there to report and provide information like national television.

I like the moment when reality and fiction, experimentation, or poetry meet.

So asking a writer, or someone else, to write a text around your subject can be a good way to shift the perspective slightly. It is a way of speaking about the work.

YK: I also think that is really important.

VT: It also helps move away from personalization.

My work is not about me. Of course, in its many layers, I also speak about myself. But in Europe, you are always expected to speak about yourself. The question I am asked most often is, “As a woman, why do you speak about this kind of thing?” I am honestly tired of that question. Thank you for not asking it.

In my first book, I did not want to focus on personalization. I did not want it to be “I did this,” or “I am so good.” Nor did I want to say, “This work is this,” or “This artist is that,” and put things into boxes.

I wanted it to open things, rather than close them.

The Photobook as a Practical Tool

YK: Finally, is there anything you would like to say to people who have already read this book, or to those who are going to read it?

VT: I have already talked too much.

I don’t know. If I had to mention something, perhaps it would be the pages. I really wanted to include page numbers. For me, a book is a practical tool. I use it daily in the studio, opening it to remember the names of photographs, because those names are really complicated.

As a photographer, a photobook is a practical tool for me. I also have a large collection in my studio. I always return to books and check texts. Books in general are extremely important to me. Many projects began with books. I have found titles for films in books. When I do not know the title of a work, I turn to books.

So I would like this book not simply to sit on a table, but to become a practical tool. I do not want it to be too sacralised. My wish is that people will pick it up and use it.

YK: Thank you.

Sadly, your residency will be ending soon, but I am looking forward to seeing what you have made here in the future.

VT: Thank you.

This text was edited based on the video interview “IACK Conversations 01,” recorded at IACK and released on July 9, 2026. It has been lightly edited for readability.

Interview and editing: Yukihito Kono, IACK

▶ Watch the full interview video with subtitles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-FBcoOXG8E

▶ Purchase Victoire Thierrée’s Okinawa!! (RVB Books, 2025)
www.iack.online/products/okinawa-by-victoire-thierree

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