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PATRICK NAGATANI

1945 - 2017

BiographyWhile advancing to his M.F.A. degree at the University of California, Japanese-American artist Patrick Nagatani worked in Hollywood making miniature sets for special effects filming during the 1970s. This technical skill coupled with his interest in movie stereotypes and icons of contrasting cultures appeared at the very beginning of his work in photography. Nagatani's first major series, working in collaboration with Andree Tracey from 1983 to 1989, took as its subject matter issues of nuclear proliferation. In this work, actors and props were composed as tableaux in ironic juxtapositions and photographed in highly saturated colore by use most often of a 20 x 24 inch Polaroid studio camera. In one of the best know images of the series taken in 1986, Japanese tourists photograph an atomic bomb explosion, evoking at once one's fascination with the horrors of war and one's oblivious concerns for its consequences. Nagatani moved to New Mexico to teach in 1987, and there he found further fuel for subject matter since the state is where the first atomic bombs were developed and tested. In 1995, the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Nagatani completed a two year project on the Japanese internment camps set up by the U.S. government during World War II and in one of which his parents were forced to relocate at the time. The series of 140 photographs were the first non-manipulated color prints of his career and serve as contemplative elegies to the hardships and inequity his parents and so many other Japanese-American endured. Nagatani's work has been the subject of over 30 individual exhibitions since his first in 1976. He is represented in dozens of institutional collections including the Museum of Photographic Arts (San Diego), Center for Creative Photography (Tucson), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and the Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris).

Source: Stulz Consultations and Appraisals.

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Entered 7/21/07 by Lisa Horne, Graduate Student in Art History & Curatorial Studies, Summer, 2007.

A master of fabricated photo-dramas, Patrick Nagatani stages elaborate tableaux that pursue the issue of nuclear power with a sense of irony. With thorough disregard for the traditional role of photography as an objective documentation of reality, especially scientific reality, Nagatani's narratives offer an animated, color-saturated view of the nuclear and military sites of New Mexico. MAGIC/MYTH/MEGATION presents a magician next to a particle accelerator in a sardonic comment on faith and illusion in the area of scientific expertise. This image and the others that appeared in the book NUCLEAR ENCHANTMENT (1991) reveal Nagatani's wry sense of humor, mastery of the constructed set, and concern for social issues.

Born in Chicago in 1945, Patrick Nagatani has made his home in New Mexico and turned his attention to this region's atomic history in the series NUCLEAR ENCHANTMENT. His work has recently been presented in one-person exhibitions at several institutions. Nagatani has received numerous honors and awards for his work.

"Nagatani, Patrick." Museum of Contemporary Photography. [http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/nagatani_patrick.php] accessed 7/20/07.

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