Victoire Thierrée – Okinawa!!

In 2019, Thierrée visited the island, home to thirty-two active US military bases and around 10,000 service personnel. She created a series of black-and-white photographs in vertical 6 × 9 format, focusing on areas around the bases where nature appeared to be reclaiming the land – an unspoken resistance to ongoing occupation. 

Inspired by this work, she extended her research in 2023 to the Smithsonian Institution Archives in Washington, D.C., where she studied the botanist Egbert H. Walker (1899–1991). After the war, Walker led a project in the Ryukyu Islands, enlisting US troops to collect natural specimens under the Servicemen’s Collecting Program. In 1951 alone, over 8,000 plant samples were gathered from areas devastated by the 1945 Battle of Okinawa. Thierrée selected forty herbarium plates from the archive and photographed them in black and white.

120 pages, 23 x 33 cm, hardcover, RVB Books (Paris).