Hot days in Camp Hansen (Signed copy)

Mao Ishikawa
Hot days in Camp Hansen (Signed copy)

Photographs: Mao Ishikawa, Toyomitsu Higa

Publisher: Aaman Shuppan

162 pages

Year: 1982

Comments: Softcover under dust jacket, with obi, 260 x 195 mm. First edition, 1982. Black & white photographs. Included in Martin Parr & Gerry Badger, The Photobook, vol.3. A very nice copy very well preserved. Scarce and collectible copy with the 6 missing pages as always. Great reproduction in gravure. Signed by Mao Ishikawa.

Ishikawa's first book, Hot Days in Camp Hansen is a very unusual beast. Photography was still a male-dominated world in Japan in the late 1970s and a female photographer from Okinawa would have had virtually no opportunities to publish her work at that time, let alone work has uninhibited as this. The book focuses on the girls who worked in bars catering for the American GIs near the US military bases. To do this project Ishikawa became one of these girls herself, working in one bar for a period of around 2 years. The result is an astonishingly frank but joyous and affectionate portrait of the girls she worked and lived with and the GIs who frequented the bar. One of a kind.

Marc Feustel

After the publication Mao decided to removed 6 pages to protect some of her friends who appeared with the solders.

It's why a lot of copy are uncompleted.