"Patrick Nagatani: Invented Realities"

Michael Abatemarco
July 6, 2018

PATRICK NAGATANI: INVENTED REALITIES

Through Sept. 9; New Mexico Museum of Art, 107 W. Palace Ave., 505-476-5072

Some look back on the Atomic Age with a sense of nostalgia and romanticism, perhaps ignoring the catastrophic hell the nuclear legacy has wrought on the environment and on human life, the ongoing effects of which continue to plague certain populations. It was a subject of longtime engagement for photographer Patrick Nagatani (1945-2017).

Nagatani, who taught in the department of art and art history at the University of New Mexico from 1987 until his retirement in 2007, dealt with subjects connected to our atomic legacy in several bodies of work that include Nuclear Enchantment, an ironic take on the public fascination with New Mexico’s darker history. The Trinity Site, for instance, must surely be among those attractions that fall under the moniker “disaster tourism.” In the 1960s, a marker was erected on the site where the first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945. With no small sense of the absurdity of turning this blight on the nation’s conscience into a tourist attraction, Nagatani ironically and intentionally posed a group of Japanese tourists photographing the stone marker in his 1989 photograph Trinity Site, Jornada del Muerto, New Mexico. The association of the marker with the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki isn’t lost on the photographer, who includes a B-52 bomber flying over the scene.

Using the Japanese tourists happily getting their portraits taken beside the marker seems a way of reminding us how little understanding and regard we have for the recent past. Nagatani also includes his own figure, with camera in hand, among the tourists. Perhaps adding himself to the work is a way of interrogating not only our changing relationship with a difficult subject, but his own part in the narrative as an image maker and a storyteller, making Trinity Site an inspiration for his own artistic pretensions.

Invented Realities, on view until early September at the New Mexico Museum of Art, centers on some of Nagatani’s major bodies of work. The show is in conjunction with Patrick Nagatani: A Survey of Early Photographs at the UNM Art Museum (through July 28) and Excavations: Buried Cars and Other Stories at the Albuquerque Museum (through Sept. 23). Taken together, these three exhibitions represent a thorough retrospective of Nagatani’s work and coincide with the release of the book Buried Cars: Excavations from Stonehenge to the Grand Canyon, a posthumously published work by Nagatani on his fictional alter ego, the archaeologist Ryochi. The book was published in June by Museum of New Mexico Press, and includes contributions by Albuquerque Museum curator Joseph Traugott.

But the show at the NMMoA focuses primarily, though not exclusively, on works in interrelated contexts. The Trinity monument appears several times. In his 1989 Polaroid Trinitite Ground Zero, Trinity Site, New Mexico from the series Nuclear Enchantment — several versions of which are on view, providing a sense of Nagatani’s process and engagement with the subject — the monument stands amid a storm of falling hunks of the eerie green irradiated glass named for the site. A figure in a protective radiation suit is in the foreground, making a futile attempt to protect himself with an umbrella. Allegedly, the actual site, part of White Sands National Monument, is safe to visit. But the National Park Service restricts access to only two days per year because it lies within the impact zone of the White Sands Missile Range. Disneyland it isn’t.

Somebody ought to tell that to Santa Fe’s tourism department, who in June ill-advisedly placed a prop replicating the Trinity Site marker, from the set of the upcoming documentary Cosmos: Possible Worlds, in front of the Santa Fe Community Convention Center. With the Santa Fe Opera’s forthcoming run of Doctor Atomic, a downbeat story of the days leading up to the 1945 Trinity detonation, and coinciding with the New Mexico History Museum’s exhibit Atomic Histories: Remembering New Mexico’s Nuclear Past, perhaps the city saw the endeavor as a promotional opportunity. The prop marker was removed on June 27, but in light of the events it commemorates, its installation in the first place was, at best, tone-deaf. According to a June 18 report in The New Mexican, Randy Randall, executive director of Tourism Santa Fe, imprudently stated at the outset, “It’s just as much fun that it’s an example of a prop used in the film industry as it is a replica of the Trinity memorial — which you can’t really get to see.”

It was odd to walk past the Cosmos prop mere moments before encountering photographs of its real-life counterpart in Invented Realities, where it appears in an entirely different context. Just over a month after the Trinity test, in August 1945, Nagatani was born to Nisei Japanese-American parents in Chicago. His parents had been imprisoned in internment camps during World War II, a fear-driven response by the U.S. government that stemmed from the war with Japan, the end result of which was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic packages, cravenly nicknamed Fat Man and Little Boy, killed an estimated 120,000 people on initial impact, with thousands more dying later from radiation poisoning. If the marker stands for anything, it stands for that.

Nagatani, a ceaseless experimenter, saw great potential for photography’s narrative possibilities as a cinematic medium. He was at the forefront of what is known as the directorial style of photography, which Kate Ware, the museum’s photography curator, states in a text panel near the start of the exhibition, “not only acknowledges that photographs are fictional but invites viewers in on the joke.” Inserting himself into his images is one way he compounded photographic narratives; he also did this with the use of props. Notable among the pieces on view in Invented Realities are works from his collaboration with Los Angeles-based artist Andrée Tracey, who painted backdrops for a series of Nagatani’s large Polaroids, which the photographer made with one of only five existing large-format Polaroid cameras. The vibrant works, something photographers working digitally today might create in Photoshop, were carefully constructed collaborations.

In Great Yellow Father, Nagatani, his camera again in hand, is shooting a school of salmon flying above what is perhaps a post-nuclear landscape. The image is dominated by the sense of cognitive dissonance; a female figure suns herself in a recliner near a picnic table littered with the detritus of a recently devoured meal. One of Tracey’s salmon props accompanies the image on display, as well as his painted backdrop for that image and another backdrop he made for a composition called Radioactive Reds. Though it is ostensibly humorous, Nagatani’s wry use of absurdity in his photographs is in service to a scathing social criticism.

Nagatani was, at heart, a colorist, something he had in common with Frederick Hammersley, his friend and academic colleague at UNM, whose exhibition To Paint Without Thinking is next to Invented Realities in a gallery of the museum’s New Wing. In fact, Trinitite Tempest, another photo from the Nuclear Enchantment series, was a gift of Hammerley’s to the museum, which has an extensive selection of Nagatani’s works in its collection. Just as Nagatani brings out rich green tones in the raining trinitite in that image, he enhanced the color schemes in his Chromatherapy series to achieve an otherworldly, lustrous impact. His interest in color was, in part, influenced by the book Colour Healing: Chromotherapy and How It Works, which he discovered in the late 1970s while living in Los Angeles. He began the series at that time while he was still a graduate student at the University of California, but later images from the 2000s also appear in the series. Several works from Chromatherapy are on view at the museum.

One work, Radiation Therapy Room — which I initially mistook as a Chromatherapy piece though it is actually from Nuclear Enchantment — shows a patient receiving radiation treatment for cancer. Like something from the annals of science fiction, the patient undergoing treatment lies prostrate, like a specimen under a microscope, the machinery poised over him in a room awash in unnatural green light. Other images from the series include Radium Springs, New Mexico from 1989, and Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Nuclear Crossroads from the same year. The latter image shows a transport truck in the distance hauling tanks of radioactive waste. In the foreground, dead roadrunners, New Mexico’s state bird, dot the desert landscape.

While Nagatani, as Ware puts it in her wall text, “didn’t just take pictures, he made pictures,” there is one series on exhibit that is, perhaps, the closest he came to straight documentary photography. Pragmatically titled Japanese-American Concentration Camps, the images, made in the 1990s, document several of the sites of former camps around the country as they appeared at the time he made them. The photos show only the traces that still remained of these locations’ somber pasts. Included are several images of the Manzanar internment camp in California, one of two camps where the artist’s parents were held against their will. This sobering series, in which he abandoned the use of constructed sets and props, is among his most affecting because of its personal nature. As a quote about the series attests, he felt an emotional connection to these images that is not present in his other work.

Only one image is included from Nagatani’s Tape-estries, a series of mixed-media works that combine chromogenic prints overlaid with masking tape. These express the photographer’s desire for what he called “the overlay of sensory experience,” as a quote pulled from his writing in Confessions of a Tapist from 2007 puts it. Often, the images in the series were of iconographic figures from Buddhist mythology. On view is Kannon-ni (2008), which depicts a bodhisattva of compassion. Many of Nagatani’s Tape-estries were late-career works that eschewed the nuclear subject matter. But they can be seen as counterpoints, or, perhaps, as antidotes to the more challenging material. Detailed and intricate in its formation, Kannon-ni appears translucent, as though it is faded by time — the result of the semi-transparent masking tape that overlays the image of the sacred figure. Only one of Kannon-ni’s hands is left untaped, a remarkably vivid palm outstretched in welcoming gesture as if to say, “Maybe we’ve made a mess of things, but not all hope is lost.”

— Michael Abatemarco