Flattening and Unflattening Space: Photography and the 1975 Okinawa International Ocean Exposition

Through an analysis of photographs produced in and around the 1975 Okinawa International Ocean Exposition, this essay develops the concepts of flattening and unflattening in material and visual registers. In line with the construction championed by Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei, the Ocean Expo demonstrates that the Japanese state took post-reversion Okinawa as a space to be flattened into the mainland. Drawing on a phenomenological approach to space, the essay explores photographs published in Ocean Expo News, an official publication of the Ocean Expo. These promotional photographs visually flattened out the land around the expo site. In this way, they oriented Okinawa within cartographic space, ready for assimilation. The essay also examines a series of photographs taken on the Amami Islands that the mainland photographer Nakahira Takuma made in response to the Ocean Expo. Through consistently disorienting photographic space itself, they suggest a mode of unflattening. Photographs taken by Okinawan activist Ahagon Shōkō of land on Iejima also warp the cartographic space of the state and the US military, as if pushing through the second dimension into the third. Taken together, these three groups of photographs suggest that an unflattening of space might happen through the body.