Fumiaki Kamegai is a curator at the Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum (Okimu), where he is responsible for photography and video works related to Okinawa. Born in Hokkaido, he is now based in Okinawa. In 2021, he curated “Mao Ishikawa: Bad Ass and Beauty – One Love,” a retrospective exhibition presenting fifteen projects spanning Mao Ishikawa’s career. The exhibition catalogue was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture’s Photography Catalogue of the Year Award in 2021. His research interests include photography, islandness, and transpositional approaches to the history of art and visual culture.
Exploring Photography in Okinawa through Photographers’ Discourses on the Multilayered Landscape
Following modernization, Okinawa has undergone drastic transformations, including the abolition of the Ryukyu Kingdom in the 1870s, the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, and the reversion of Okinawa to Japan in 1972. This presentation introduces the concept of Sa-ishiki, which emerged in connection with the anti-reversion movement during the period leading up to the reversion, when administrative control was transferred from the U.S. military administration to Japan. By continually sensing a difference from dominant forms of sovereignty, this concept makes it possible to begin thinking from the autonomous individual, rather than from a position of identification. This approach offers a particularly productive way of viewing the landscape of Okinawa as a site of overlapping layers. This presentation examines selected texts and discourses by photographers and their photographs from this period and afterward, using them as examples to consider distinctive forms of photographic representation within the history of photography in Okinawa.