Breaking away
The late photographer Patrick Nagatani’s only published novel, The Race: Tales in Flight, follows the first-person accounts of 15 international women fighter pilots who embark upon a race across the Pacific from Tokyo to San Francisco. Their stories are framed by a narrative in which a team of archaeologists, including Nagatani’s alter ego, the mysterious Ryoichi, uncover a trove of missing World War II-era Spitfire fighter planes in a remote temple region of Burma. The Race is an allegory for the world’s reawakening of the divine and all-powerful feminine mystique, embodied by the novel’s group of protagonists. Beginning with the University of New Mexico Art Museum’s opening of Patrick Nagatani: A Survey of Early Photographs on Friday, April 27, three concurrent shows in Albuquerque and Santa Fe showcase Nagatani’s works this spring. On the cover is his 2013 archival digital print Ayame Kobahashi in Flight, Champagne 2, which accompanies the novel’s text.
Patrick Nagatani (1945-2017) was among the most creative of contemporary American photographers. An innovator since early in his career, he made evocative use of color in much of his work, manipulating hues to create a sense of dreamlike reverie, crafting compositions that engaged the intellect as well as the senses. His works explore political, cultural, and historical moments, taking a wry look at such uncomfortable subjects as the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the legacies of the nuclear age. He dealt with these topics in ways that often revealed their absurdities.
Nagatani, who died in Oct. 2017, is being honored at the University of New Mexico Art Museum with an exhibit of works made near the start of his career. Patrick Nagatani: A Survey of Early Photographs, opening Friday, April 27, provides a fascinating look at his influences and career-long interest in a cinematic style of photography. It’s the first of three shows of Nagatani’s work in Albuquerque and Santa Fe that take place in conjunction with one another. The other shows are Patrick Nagatani: Invented Realities, which opens at the New Mexico Museum of Art on May 26, and Excavations, opening at the Albuquerque Museum in late June.
“The exhibit highlights the work that he did before he came to New Mexico,” said Mary Statzer, the UNM museum’s curator of prints and photographs. Statzer selected images from several series that Nagatani gifted to UNM, where he taught photography from 1987 to 2007. “He was born in Chicago, but his family left when he was eleven and settled in Los Angeles,” she said. “He went to college there and grad school. He spent the first part of his career as an artist in Los Angeles. We’re really lucky to have this nice group of early works from him. He had a big impact on the photo program here at UNM, which is nationally recognized, and on the arts community. He was much loved as a member of the arts community here. I think he had a significant impact nationally as a photographer. His career was long, diverse, and had multiple levels of impact.” The work in the exhibition Patrick Nagatani: A
Survey of Early Photographs includes selections from several series, including from Chromatherapy, which he began in the late 1970s as a graduate student at the University of California - Los Angeles and started up again in the 2000s. “He was one of three students entered into the UCLA program at that point,” Statzer said. “A lot of this work was made when he was in graduate school. It’s interesting, since students are a big part of our constituency, that we can show how he developed these major bodies of work while he was a student. He was a pretty sophisticated student. He had about a 10-year period between undergraduate school, where he did his BA in industrial arts and art. He had a double major. He was an incredible technical draftsman.” According to Statzer, Nagatani took only one undergraduate course in photography at California State University in Los Angeles, a beginner’s course, and although he pursued the medium at UCLA, none of his coursework involved the darkroom, since the curriculum at the time emphasized a more experimental approach. Nagatani studied under Robert Heinecken, a major influence on the Los Angeles photography scene, who made some of his work without a camera. “UCLA was a very difficult program to get into in 1977, when he applied,” Statzer said. “It was one of the hot schools for photography, like UNM was and continues to be. It was known for unorthodox approaches to photography. Nagatani’s conceptdriven work really fit in there.”
Chroma, or color therapy, an alternative medical practice, involves the use of colored light to treat physical, emotional, and psychological imbalances. Nagatani came to the subject by happenstance. “He was interested in color. He was looking for ideas to pursue in his first year of graduate school,” said Statzer, who has chosen to only show images from
Chromatherapy that Nagatani made in 1978. “He was a marathon runner at the time and was in Palm Springs, training. He went into a bookstore and found a small booklet about color light therapy. When he saw it, he thought, ‘This is it.’ It was an idea that had legs for him and a lasting effect. He worked on it almost exclusively in his first year.”
Chromatherapy may have been the first series Nagatani made as a graduate student, but the portfolio that got him accepted into the program — Chroma
Room — was also a color-centric body of work. Chroma Room is a sophisticated series, already reflecting a working style that remained ongoing: the directorial mode, which involved elaborate set-ups; the use of props for subjects to engage with; and a sense of narrative — even if, in Nagatani’s compositions, to elicit a No. 4 clear story from the works demands that the viewer make a conceptual leap. Much of Nagatani’s work is enigmatic. Some of the imagery in the Chroma Room photos, for example, was drawn from his dreams, which he wrote down in a journal. “It took him about 11 months to make them,” Statzer said. “He took a room in his home and painted it something like 13 times with different colors. He was letting the color work on his psyche and then having that enacted for the camera.”
For A Party, Beverly Hills, U.S.A., among the blackand-white photographs in the exhibit, Nagatani took hundreds of shots in a single evening in 1980, working with a portable studio set-up he brought to a swanky Hollywood party. “It was either a bar mitzvah or a kid’s birthday party — I’ve heard him
For A Party, Beverly Hills, U.S.A., among the black-and-white photographs in the exhibit Patrick Nagatani: A Survey of Early Photographs, Nagatani took hundreds of shots in a single evening in 1980, working with a portable studio set-up he brought to a swanky Hollywood party.
call it both — and he called up the host of the party and asked if he could come and set up his camera. He used white paper to roll out as the backdrop. He didn’t really have to do anything. It was like a magnet. People just came and he let them do whatever they wanted to do in front of the camera. This was a party with a wealthy host, wealthy guests. There were a lot of big shots there: Beverly Hills lawyers, et cetera. As the night wore on, the backdrop got completely torn up. I love that there’s evidence of that passage of time.”
A Party, Beverly Hills, U.S.A. and another series, Kosmopolites (1978-1980), make reference to the early 20th-century photography of E.J. Bellocq, a commercial photographer based in New Orleans who shot portraits of prostitutes from the city’s redlight district, also using a plain backdrop. “Bellocq’s photographs were rediscovered in the late ’60s, early ’70s, by the photographer Lee Friedlander, who resurrected the glass plates and printed them posthumously,” Statzer said. “They were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. Nagatani talks about being interested in Bellocq, and especially the very simple backdrop and seeing what people do in front of it. In the
Kosmopolites, he invited friends and acquaintances — all women — to bring the clothes that they wanted to wear and a mask. He was interested in how he would depict them and how they would present themselves.”
Nagatani was an active participant in front of the lens in much of his own work, as an integral part of the compositions. Those images — several of which are in the exhibit — are not self-portraits, at least not in a traditional sense. He created personas who were not subjects, specifically, but elements of unfolding dramas. He carried that theme over to later works such as his Excavations series, which has a narrative about a mysterious archaeologist named Ryoichi (Nagatani’s full name is Patrick Ryoichi Nagatani). Ryoichi discovers an alternative past at various archaeological sites around the world, unearthing objects from the recent past, such as automobiles rather than ancient relics. Nagatani built models of the partially excavated cars and then photographed them. The series, in which past and present are conflated, presents viewers with contradictions. In a statement about Excavations, a project
he began in 1985, he wrote, “My field photographs are the only record of Ryoichi’s excavation campaign that remains.”
Excavations has an antecedent in Celestial Earthscapes, a series he began in 1979, several images from which are being shown at the museum. The works evoke otherworldly landscapes but are actually composed of common household items like aluminum foil, scraps of metal, mirrors, and other items. Nagatani arranged them into a tableau, to appear as views of Earth from space. “He moonlighted doing technical drafting for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,” Statzer said. “He also filed photographs that were collected by Mariner and other spacecraft. One of the things that’s unique about this show is that, for people in Albuquerque and New Mexico who may have never seen this body of work, we’ll be showing them something new, hopefully.”