Obituary: Patrick Nagatani (1945–2017)

Japanese-American photographer Patrick Allen Ryiochi Nagatani, known for his photographic collages, passed away at the age of 72 in his Albuquerque home on October 27. His wife Leigh Anne Langwell has stated the cause of death as colon cancer.

Although Nagatani was raised in the United States, his work explored the recent history of Japan and his family’s hometown of Hiroshima. He was born in Chicago on August 19, 1945, less than two weeks after the US aircraft Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb, known as “Little Boy,” on Hiroshima, obliterating the coastal city. His parents, before they married, were held in internment camps in California and Arkansas where Japanese-Americans were detained after the US declaration of war against Japan in December 1941. They later met in Chicago, after being released.

Nagatani never received formal photography training. Instead, he studied the techniques behind producing special effects for films, and made models that appeared in science fiction movies in the 1970s and ’80s, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Blade Runner (1982). His experience in building miniature and full-sized film sets, along with what happened to the town of his family’s origins, formed the core of his practice. In photographic collages that eschewed digital manipulation, the artist addressed America’s nuclear development and its lasting impact on the nation’s psyche, invoking the construction of nuclear power plants that power all facets of daily life, while referencing the stockpiling of nuclear armaments that advanced brinkmanship during the Cold War.

“There’s a certain edge to photography that’s really restricting,” Nagatani once said of his chosen mode of expression. “It’s a controlled medium, especially in the process. And I just want to throw that control out as much as possible.” To defy the conventional boundaries of photography, Nagatani deployed printing and hand-coloring in his tableaux, generating absurd images that seethe with biting social commentary.

Even now, Nagatani’s 40-image “Nuclear Enchantment” (1988–93) series is still relevant in light of current events: North Korea pushes forward every day with its nuclear weapon and missile programs, and the United States just performed a show of force by stationing three of the world’s largest aircraft carriers at the DPRK’s doorstep. One image in the series, 'Fat Man and Little Boy', F-111D’s, 27th Tactical Fighter Wing, Cannon Air Force Base, near Clovis, New Mexico (1990) shows US fighter jets flying low in formation, with the Star-Spangled banner and the flag of New Mexico—where the Manhattan Project detonated its first nuclear device—fluttering in the wind. In the foreground, a little boy gazes up at the jets in fascination, while an adult’s gloved hand hoists forward a passport photo of a fat man.

Nagatani held many solo exhibitions throughout his life, including at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles in 2011; the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, in 2000; and the Royal Photographic Society in Bath, England, in 1993.

For two decades, from 1987 to 2007, Nagatani was an educator at the University of New Mexico, where he trained a new crop of photographers among the desert landscape. He authored a novel, The Race: Tales in Flight, about the discovery of 15 British fighter aircrafts buried in Myanmar at the end of World War II, which was published this year. A documentary film about the artist’s life, Patrick Nagatani: Living in the Story, will be released next year.

Brady Ng is the reviews editor of ArtAsiaPacific.

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