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Bodies and Structures

"The dark blue blouses with white strips"

"The dark blue blouses with white strips on cuff and around neck flap are the school girl costume. This is a Japanese influence. As you see the girls on the left are doing all possible to hide their faces from the camera, the others too dumbfounded to turn in time. A second later they all ran back the path at the left. Nearby all the babies carried on their elders backs fall asleep and their heads dangle as on the girls back at the right. In America we are so careful to keep the baby's neck from bending, but here it is not considered so terrible."

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Okinawan Children 8 Children in Gail's Photos structured_gallery 2018-12-05T16:14:17-05:00 Dustin Wright
Gail often photographed represent, perhaps, a face of Okinawa that did not directly experience the war but was obviously reared in the poverty and material deprivation of the postwar. These images were taken only six or seven years after the war and the lingering effects are plainly visible: clothing made from repurposed military uniforms; children wearing military boots several sizes too big if they wore shoes at all; children who appear, as in the photo below entitled "Little fellow's head," to not quite know what to make of the white man behind the camera.
We have to wonder whether or not Gail was in uniform as he scoured the countryside looking for photogenic people and and striking landscapes. Certainly, whether uniformed or not, that he was a white man would most likely have let those he encountered to assume that he was a member of the occupying military, a figure both awkwardly out of place and yet simultaneously inscribed with colonial privilege and power. In some of the photos in this section, it is clear that the children are trying to avoid the camera's gaze, Gail himself, or both. In 1955, only three years after Gail took these photos, a 31-year-old American raped and murdered 6-year-old Nagayama Yumiko, a crime that roiled Okinawa and served to exacerbate fears of American military men.