This pair of projects offers a full look into the invention and innovation Patrick Nagatani brings to contemporary art
practice both as a singular thinker and creator of captivating imagery, and as an artist open to and adept at collaboration
and cross-media expression, said Trudy Wilner Stack, curator of Nagatani/Tracey Collaboration, 1983-1989 and
Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at the Center for Creative Photography. His work in the 1980s with painter Andree
Tracey established a new vocabulary and approach to content for photography, and his most recent series with Ryoichi
brings science and fantasy together with the heady wit and incisive cultural insight that characterize all of Nagatani's art.
CCP's acquisition of the Nagatani/Tracey collaborations ensures these memorable images will be preserved,
continually discovered and available to the public long into the future, said Nancy Lutz, Acting Director at the Center for
Creative Photography. We are proud to be the only museum repository of what is perhaps Nagatani's best known and
most influential work.
NAGATANI/TRACEY COLLABORATION, 1983-1989
This exhibition commemorates CCP’s acquisition of the only complete set of the forty collaborative works of
photographer Patrick Nagatani and painter Andrée Tracey. Working with the large-format 20x24 Polaroid camera, they
created some of contemporary photography’s most original, humorous, and haunting commentaries on global
issues—from nuclear threats to cross-cultural identities to the corporate domination of consumer life. Distinctively
combining diverse aesthetic references and techniques, many of their staged tableaux have already become landmark
images.
Nagatani/Tracey Collaboration, 1983-1989 was organized by the Center for Creative Photography and is supported in
part by the Arizona Commission on the Arts. The work challenges the traditional role of photography as an objective
documentation of reality. Nagatani and Tracey staged narrative photo-tableaux in order to break down divisions between
media, and blur the boundary between the real and the artificial, between photographic fact and fiction. They worked in a
mode borrowed from advertising and set design and combined in a single tableau painted backdrops, furniture, objects
suspended from monofilament, live figures (often themselves), and previously photographed images.
Some of the most recognizable photographs included in the exhibition are Alamogordo Blues, 1986, which depicts a
crowd of people during a bomb test wearing dark glasses, holding cameras, with Polaroid SX-70s flying all around
them—the entire scene awash in the red of a nuclear dawn; and a three-panel work, Fusion Feast, 1989, which begins
in the first panel as a cheerful domestic still life of a kitchen table and view out of a window that is violently interrupted by
a bomb blast, then dissolves into a scene of nuclear devastation.
Nagatani and Tracey collaborated for the first time in 1983 when they were invited to work with the Polaroid camera for a
group exhibition in San Diego. Nagatani was primarily the photographer, Tracey the painter. Together they developed
themes and staged the set-ups to be photographed. Their work reflects their shared interest in socially relevant themes,
a black sense of humor, and a belief that irony and irreverence are mechanisms for coping with what became their
primary theme: the threat of nuclear destruction.
Nagatani recently said about the collaboration with Tracey, Our photographic scenarios served as the perfect arena in
which to explore our themes of disaster beyond our control. In this blend of fact and fiction, the threat was (and still is) so
great that it seemed unreal, the reality so awful it was/is impossible to comprehend.
RYOICHI/NAGATANI EXCAVATIONS
In the exhibition Ryoichi/Nagatani Excavations Nagatani employs science to create and validate an alternative past that
questions the assumption that time is linear. Working from the field journals of Japanese archaeologist Ryoichi and
photographing excavations undertaken by Ryoichi’s team, Nagatani presents evidence of a past where a Jaguar
automobile was ceremonially buried within the foundations of the observatory at Chichén Itzá in the Yucatan, and a
Ferrari emerges from a volcanic shroud at Herculaneum.
Ryoichi/Nagatani Excavations is curated by Kathleen Stewart Howe, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photography at the
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and is organized and circulated by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions,
Los Angeles, California. It is funded in part by The Lende Foundation.
The exhibition is composed of color photographs of archaeological sites demonstrating the presence of automotive
culture at disparate points in earth’s space and time. Photographs of Ryoichi’s journal entries, recovered artifacts, site
plans, and maps are presented as documentation. The visual material is supported by text panels describing the
excavations and providing scientific information such as carbon-dated laboratory results.
Nagatani describes the project: In 1985, Ryoichi and his team received a set of maps which were interpreted as
pointing to sites scattered throughout the world. The sites were in areas with significant archaeological or historical
remains…or with monuments to our own technological age…. The archaeologists spent the next fifteen years secretly
excavating the sites and then removing all traces of their finds… My field photographs and photographs of recovered
artifacts are the only record of Ryoichi's excavation campaign that remains.
I hope to challenge us to examine the ways in which photography creates, recreates, or supports a particular history,
Nagatani said. Finally, I am interested in beauty, desire, wonderment, possibilities, and an audience that is willing to
suspend belief, to use the right hemisphere of the brain as much as the left.
PATRICK NAGATANI’s work is in many major private and public collections and has been exhibited internationally since
1976, including at the Art Institute of Boston; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; and the Royal Photographic
Society, Bath, England. Numerous books have featured his work including Nuclear Enchantment (1991) and Patrick
Nagatani and Andrée Tracey (1987), Seizing the Light: A History of Photography by Robert Hirsch (2000), and
Photography by Barbara London and John Upton (1998). He has been the recipient of many awards including the
Polaroid Fellowship and the NEA Visual Arts Fellowship. Currently a Professor of Art at the University of New Mexico,
Nagatani lives in Albuquerque.
ANDRÉE TRACEY is a Minneapolis-based artist whose paintings and photographs have been widely exhibited, most
recently at the Schneider Gallery in Chicago. She has been a Brody, McKnight, and Arts Midwest Fellow.
IMAGE:
Photograph by Patrick Nagatani,
Model A Woody, National Radio Astronomy Observatory (VLA),
Plains of St. Augustin, New Mexico, U.S.A., 1997/1999.
©1997/1999 Patrick Nagatani.
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