Artist Statement
When Nakagawa first visited Okinawa, he was shocked by the gap between the picturesque landscape and its tragic history, which led him to start working on three series. BANTA describes with high resolution the cliffs where many citizens were forced to commit suicide during the US invasion. GAMA shows with long exposure the spiritual caves which were used as hospitals, foxholes, and even as the site for suicide during World War II. REMAINS shows remnants of the war and their silent existence. Nakagawa, whose cultural identity bridges Japan and America, has been pulled back and forth between these two cultures, mirroring the experience of Okinawa. Furthermore, for Nakagawa to come face to face with Okinawa meant confronting with his personal history as his wife is Okinawan. We may see that these works were created not as objective documents, but rather as a personal dialogue between the artist and Okinawa as he strives to make visual the invisibility of memory through the power of imagination.
Process Statement
Photography has long been linked to the idea of representation – its goal was to show things as they were. In my work, I am working to move beyond simply representing a landscape and into creating an entirely new visual experience for the viewer. I create images that present viewers with a hyper-real experience, an experience that could not exist without digital technology, in which they can feel the aura of the landscape itself. The landscapes of Okinawa are loaded with history and my work is an effort to bring viewers into that history as witnesses, not simply observers.
Osamu James Nakagawa was born in New York City; raised in Tokyo, Japan and returned to Houston, Texas at the age of 15. He received a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the University of Houston. His photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, George Eastman House, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. In 2009 Nakagawa received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support his project in Okinawa and in 2010 the Higashikawa Photo Festa’s New Photographer of the Year Award in Japan. Nakagawa lives in Bloomington, Indiana, USA where he is a professor of photography at the Henry Radford Hope School of Art at Indiana University.
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