Sleeping Trees

Sleeping Trees is the first photobook by Sayaka Uehara, a photographer born in Okinawa who now lives and works there again. It gathers everyday scenes of the island in which almost no people appear, yet every place carries traces of the lives and history that passed through it. Published by Akaaka Art Publishing in 2022.

The story behind the book

Uehara photographs while walking the streets near her home, sometimes taking a bus to get off in another town. A mannequin's fingers, restaurant seats, the shadow of a plane passing a jukebox, a cloth-bound Bible, a McDonald's sign. Ordinary scenes seem to speak in a voice without words. Her view runs on from her own daily life, imagining the time each place has lived through, and points toward the pain held in its silence.

The title recalls the many tree silhouettes in the book, and above all the white leadtree (ginnemu). As novelist Eiki Matayoshi wrote, after the war the US military scattered its seeds across Okinawa to hide the damage, and it now grows everywhere. The fence-like pattern on the cover comes from this tree.

What is in the book

• Landscapes of Okinawa photographed close to everyday life
• A cover pattern taken from the white leadtree, with the photograph of a mannequin's fingers
• Reprinted in January 2026

About Sayaka Uehara

Born in 1993 in Okinawa, Uehara graduated from Tokyo Zokei University in 2016. Her series The Others, on memories and scars that surface in the Okinawan landscape, received the Higashikawa Award New Photographer Prize in 2020.