I am interested in the unseen.

Introduction

There are moments – just before dawn or at nightfall – when what is visible and what is imagined comingle. The half-light. It is a time when hard reality softens – memories seep osmotically and speculation curdles. This loosening of the literal is not so much obfuscation and a kind of liberty to envision something beyond the here and now. Of course, if you are driving a car, it is best to stay in the real world and switch on the headlights. But if you have the stillness to pause and reflect, there is another kind of journey to undertake.

Osamu James Nakagawa is an artist whose photographs harness this potential of the penumbral to evoke the spirit of place and ghosts of a past that still linger in the present. Born in New York of Japanese heritage, he spent his childhood and early teens in Tokyo before returning to the USA where he has lived all his adult life. His cultural perspective is consequently from a place that is at the threshold of two very different cultures and histories. In-between.

In this interview we discuss works that span four decades. Over that time, the photographs become not so much darker – though this is also true – but deeper. The imagery is poignant both in its ability to educe emotion and in the way it suggests the memory of traumas past continuing to haunt the ambience of the present. And, in the conceptual and aesthetic half-light of this historical present, he glimpses the shadow-side of humanity.

Alasdair Foster

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Interview

You were born in the USA but spent your formative years in Japan before returning to the USA in your mid-teens. How have those two cultural contexts shaped you as an artist?

Clearly, one’s cultural identity influences one’s culture practice, and my perspective is from a liminal space between the two countries. I was born in New York, but we moved to Tokyo when I was just seven months old. So, I grew up as a typical Japanese child. However, I noticed early on that my household was somewhat different from others. At home, my parents were Mommy and Daddy, and they called me Jimmy even though my Japanese name is Osamu. This blend of cultures felt a bit confusing. My brother, who was five when we moved back to Japan, remembered things like Disneyland and would brag about it. Meanwhile, I only knew the US through our 8mm home movies and Japanese-dubbed American TV shows.

Then in 1977, we moved to Houston for my father’s work. I remember riding in the car from the airport, and immediately seeing tons of billboards, vast freeways, images everywhere. Everything was huge. I wanted to see Disneyland, but it wasn’t quite what I’d imagined from those old home movies and listening to my brother’s boasts. They didn’t really match reality, which seemed more fake. I had to come to terms with my expectation of the land of opportunity and the reality of the American Dream.

How did you settle in?

I honestly didn’t realise I was ‘different’ until I got to school. Kids started calling me ‘Jap’ or ‘yellow’. I didn’t even know what they meant. In Japan I had just been a regular kid, but I quickly felt a degree of racial hostility.

The decades from the seventies to the nineties spanned the rise and fall of Japan’s economy. Initially Americans embraced the higher quality Japanese goods and exotic culture. But in the eighties, this shifting economic power made some Americans hostile toward things Japanese, vandalising Japanese cars and radios. I had thought this country was a land of opportunity, open to free trade, but if you are non-white and become too successful, they don’t like it. I felt it was all very hypocritical.

I would like to begin by discussing two bodies of work made in the limestone caves under the islands of Okinawa. What drew you to these dark spaces?

These caves – the Okinawan word for cave is gama – had long been places of sanctuary and mourning. Shamans used to hold pilgrimages there. Historically, Okinawans placed bodies in these caves or by the cliffs, later collecting the bones to be cleaned for burial. During WWII the caves were used as air raid shelters, military bases, and living quarters. The cliffs outside the caves had been the site of mass suicides towards the end of the war. Around the time I was there, the Japanese government was trying to change high school textbooks to say that those mass suicides had been voluntary, not compelled by the Japanese military. This had upset a lot of people, and some twenty thousand had protested the proposed change. This really made me start to wonder: if that was the story of the cliffs, what about the caves? I was curious about the loaded history enveloped in those limestone caverns. I wanted to challenge myself by stepping into the darkness. It was an eerie and unsettling place. Some caves still have burnt areas, bits of grenade, human bones. The energy is intense.

What did you seek to capture in these images?

I am interested in the unseen. Yes, part of it is about visualising my personal emotions, but it is equally shaped by the historical emotions carried in the energy that enveloped me as I photographed inside the cave. Most of the time we photograph to capture a single moment, but here I intentionally used the camera to slowly accumulate the aura of the cave over time and let that energy enter it. Using a high-end digital-back camera, I opened the shutter while I walked around with a flashlight [torch], painting light onto the cave walls. In postproduction, I drew on that ritualised way of lighting to further enhance the energy that I had felt.

‘Gama: Darkness’ extends this exploration of form and blackness while registering details of the cave surfaces.

‘Gama’, was about revealing the cave, making visible what’s normally hidden by darkness. But later I realised that wasn’t really what I had experienced in those places. Moving around in the dark, I had only seen fragments. So, even though the photographs revealed everything, they didn’t reflect how it actually felt to be there. With ‘Gama: Darkness’ I was creating darkness instead of revealing the space.

The images were printed on an inkjet printer that uses eight different shades of carbon-black ink. This results in an incredible tonal range, without any pure white. There is so much nuance – the images seem to be slowly emerging from the dark, which felt much closer to my actual experience in the caves.

Although these caves are associated with fear and death, they were also sanctuaries. The images themselves, while dark in tonality, seem almost gentle in the way they engage the mineral surfaces.

Envisioning emotion in landscape photography can be quite challenging. The works ‘Gama’ and ‘Gama: Darkness’, while visually distinct, both emerged from darkness and evolved towards abstraction. With the latter work, the sense of place remains uncertain, it only becomes evident when you know the context. It’s hard to tell if the image is disappearing or appearing, and perhaps this uncertainty triggers our emotion.

Moving now to the USA and two bodies of work – made more than twenty years apart – that feature abandoned open-air movie screens. How did ‘Drive-In Theatre’ come about?

When I began seriously exploring digital photography, I used it as a tool to portray what I saw and felt growing up in America. Naturally, I gravitated toward Americana and street photography, but I didn’t know how to bring that style of image-making into the digital space in a meaningful way.

Then a painter friend of mine pointed out that I had only selected a few images from my contact sheets, why not go back and look at the ones I hadn’t picked. That really stuck with me. So, I went through all my old contact sheets, and that’s when I found a photo of an empty drive-in theatre I’d shot in New Mexico. This gave me the idea of digitally ‘projecting’ an image onto the blank screen. Later, the work expanded to take in billboards, inspired by my first memory of driving into L.A.

In a way, I was combining the approaches of mid-twentieth-century street photography and the New Topographics within a digital pictorialist environment. Of course, digital tools were super slow back then, but that gave me time to think, to imagine. I wanted to juxtapose imagery as a way to demystify the American Dream.

How did you go about that?

Drive-in theatres arose in the heyday of the white American Dream, right? But into this I ‘projected’ references to racial injustice, border issues, a native American cemetery, the civil rights movement… At the same time, the distance between the viewer and the screen creates a contemplative space. The images critical of the Dream are there, but they are surrounded by a decaying American landscape. So, before you even get to the image on the screen, you have to confront this broken environment.

There was a time when families would take their car to the drive-in to watch Hollywood films idealising the American Dream, a dream reserved for white folks. You know, these images were created over thirty years ago, yet we are still stuck in the same cycle. The scary thing is that they are claiming back that dream.

The later series, begun in 2018, is much darker (emotionally and literally). What drew you back to the drive-ins, and what were you exploring in this more recent approach?

In 2017, I was in Tokyo for a meeting with my gallery, planning an upcoming show. They were interested in exhibiting my ‘Drive-In Theatre’ series – which by then was thirty years old. On the way to that meeting, the US election happened. Soon after, I kept hearing phrases like ‘alternative truth’, and ‘fake news’. It made me reflect on my earlier work, to question how relevant it remained. I went back to my old drive-in negatives and began thinking about how to create something new from them. At the time, I’d been making very dense prints of ‘Gama: Darkness’ and I decided to carry that deep tonality into this new work. I experimented by mixing positives and negatives, digital and analogue, so the viewer can’t easily tell what’s what. The result was this eerily dystopian depiction of drive-in theatres.

I made a conscious choice not to put anything on the screen. I felt like ‘Drive-in Theatre’ had predicted the future. I wasn’t interested in doing that again. Instead, I wanted to quietly express my feeling that we are moving towards a very dark place in the history of our country.

Why did you call this series ‘Eclipse’?

An eclipse is when light is overtaken by shadow, turning everything dark for a time. In that way, it felt like a perfect metaphor, the light of American culture being slowly consumed by darkness. And, just like an actual eclipse, the whole world goes dark for a while… but eventually the sun returns. It’s a cycle – we all hope this darkness will end.

The final two bodies of work I would like to discuss extend those ideas into the landscape while bringing together Japanese and American historical threads. Let’s begin with ‘Trace’… But first can you set the historical context…

Two months after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, forcibly incarcerating approximately 125,000 resident Japanese and Japanese Americans. These camps were mainly in the arid American West, many constructed on Native American land. These families suffered the dual trauma of losing their land, homes, and businesses while being isolated in this harsh desolate environment at the hands of their own government.

In February 2022, on the eightieth anniversary of Executive Order 9066, I embarked on a 24,888-mile journey to visit the sites of every incarceration camp established after the 1942 order. The vast emptiness and isolation of these locations struck me deeply as I imagined the thousands of people who had been confined there. This work seeks to give voice to that silenced past, honouring the resilience of those who endured this injustice by ensuring its impact continues to be felt today.

How did you go about this?

I document my experiences through digital photography, film, and various alternative processes. I started by making a series of cyanotype photograms of objects I found at the site: nails, barbed wire, broken glass, rusted cans. I even made film from frottage rubbings of the memorials and used those in the cyanotypes. Combining these different forms of image-making lends a strange push and pull to the work. The camera distances, allowing time for contemplation, while making frottages and cyanotypes is tactile, obsessive. Those divergent practices served as yin and yang, complemented by the diptych format, suggesting the complexity of visualising past and present. In turn, I think this helps ignite an emotional response.

When I was on-site, I wasn’t thinking about how everything would come together, that happened later in the studio. I had to create a visual syntax through the juxtaposition of elements in order to communicate the sense of place while also revealing its history through the found objects. It took almost three years following my return from these pilgrimages before the work was finally ready to present to the public.

The challenge is that I’m trying to reveal what can’t be seen anymore. Things that happened eighty years ago and were, I think, intentionally buried. It is this direct and immersive process of using the actual objects and surfaces from the site that has helped me to unearth this all but forgotten history.

And finally, ‘Witness Trees’, which extends your explorations of and reflections upon the internment camps. What took you in this new direction?

In ‘Traces’, I had been focusing on fragments – bits of concrete, debris, old nails, shards of glass – setting them in contrast to the wide, empty landscape. There was no one around. It was completely quiet, isolating even. Then, one day, I happened to look up and saw a tree, just standing there. I felt comforted, like someone was watching. I didn’t feel alone anymore. In that moment, I decided I would take portraits of these trees.

I pictured them standing, watching… These trees may well have witnessed the Japanese people incarcerated in the 1940s and, as with the Okinawan caves in the ‘Gama’ series, I imagined them holding the memory of trauma. In all, I photographed over eighty different trees.

These images have an otherworldly feel, partly arising from their unusual tonal gradations. How was this achieved, and why did you choose this approach?

I decided to push the visual language that I had begun exploring with ‘Gama: Darkness’ and subsequently evolved in ‘Eclipse’. Each of these works resonates with a sense of darkness, capturing both visual depth and emotional intensity. Eventually, I landed on a tonality that reminded me of tintypes… kind of solarised, kind of like infrared, but not quite either. At first, I was unsure. I thought, maybe this is too gimmicky. But I didn’t want to self-censor, so I made several prints in this style and showed them to my MFA students and peers. They all said the same thing: this feels haunted and emotional. And that was the feeling I was after.

In making these series over the past four decades, what have you learned about yourself?

One important lesson I’ve learned is to trust my instincts. When I was younger, I struggled with this, but after four decades of creating work, I feel confident in making intuitive decisions. In this way, I’ve learned how to surprise myself through my artmaking. And that’s why I continue to create: I want to feel free, stay open, and keep discovering unexpected things.

Art has taught me the importance of connection and, through my work, I strive to share my experiences and feelings with others.

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His photographs are held in many prestigious public and private collections including, in the USA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, Texas), George Eastman House (Rochester, New York), Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, Missouri), and Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, Massachusetts). In Japan, collections include Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, and Sakima Art Museum (Okinawa). Osamu James Nakagawa is currently the Distinguished Professor of Art and the Ruth N. Halls Professor at Indiana University. He lives and works in Bloomington, Indiana.

Photo: Kevin Mooney

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This interview is a Talking Pictures original.

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