Osamu James Nakagawa

Osamu James Nakagawa (born 1962) is a Japanese-American photographer. He is known for multiple, cross-cultural series exploring geopolitical landscape, family, memory and personal identity, including his own transnational experience. He initially gained notice as an early digital photographer, however his work has ranged between digital color and black-and-white imagery, and computer-manipulated collage, traditional "straight" photography and large photographic installation. Writers such as curator Anne Wilkes Tucker describe his work as challenging, layered and in a poetic vein, rather than documentary or narrative in nature.

Nakagawa has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the cities of Higashikawa and Sagamihara in Japan, among others. Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Sakima Art Museum in Japan. His work belongs to the public collections of those museums and others, including the Museum of Contemporary Photography and George Eastman Museum. Nakagawa is a professor of photography at Indiana University and lives and works in Bloomington, Indiana.

Early life and education Nakagawa was born in 1962 in New York City to Japanese-born parents. After he completed high school, his parents returned to Japan, but Nakagawa remained in Houston, earning a BA in studio art from St. Thomas University in 1986. "Picturing Asia" (1994–5, Houston Center for Photography), and "Field of Vision" (1998, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston). A 1994 Time review of the "Metamorphoses" show—one of the first devoted to digital photography—suggested that work such as Nakagawa's challenged and subverted long-held myths about the truth of photography. He was also included in the shows "After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age" (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), "War/Photography: Photographs of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath," (Museum of Fine Arts Houston; Brooklyn Museum, 2012–4), and “From the Cave” (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 2018).

Early series Osamu James Nakagawa, K.K.K., from the "Drive-in Theater" series, Type-C print, 26.5" x 40", 1992. Nakagawa's "Mado" (window) series (1988–2000) consisted of 4-by-5-inch black-and-white minimalist prints of off-kilter perspectives through screens and delicate, abstract patterns formed by raindrops and condensation. The New York Times described them as wistful views "of a perpetual outsider" inviting close attention to their "calligraphic simplicity." He began them during a period of swift change in his life, when he simultaneously confronted his father's terminal cancer and the impending birth of his daughter. The series' title (which means between) and formats reflect an attempt to make sense of his own life experience and three generations of images taking place in an evolving, liminal space between two countries.

The "Banta" (Okinawan for cliff) works (2008) depict towering natural structures that became known as "Suicide Cliffs" after thousands of locals dove to their deaths during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. The photographs have been noted for a hyperreal quality that combines razor-sharp focus and detail (of visceral crags, craters and planes) impossible to capture in a single frame and a dizzying quality resulting from tilted perspectives and tight cropping. The photographs appear like massive textured abstractions, which on close inspection suggest figuration or reveal details and artifacts—pieces of bowls and bottles, bone fragments, vines—from various uses.

Collections His work belongs to the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Corcoran Museum of Art, George Eastman House, and Worcester Art Museum.