Osamu James Nakagawa: Landscape as Witness

Osamu James Nakagawa (b. 1962) has had a long a distinguished career in photography, and is currently Professor of Photography at Indiana University. His approaches shift between the personal and the political—both stemming from his transnational experience of living in Japan and the United States. In this talk, he will focus on several landscape series: the first is of the Japanese island prefecture of Okinawa, dramatizing in large-scale color the military, social, and environmental histories of this unique region. The second is comprised of his new projects, Witness Trees and American Truths, created from visiting WWII Japanese American Incarceration Campsites, which navigate between historical memory and present-day reality in densely rendered black and white imagery.