Osamu James Nakagawa
University of Houston, Houston, TX
Osamu James Nakagawa graduated from the University of Houston with a MFA in Photography. He has exhibited his work in Texas since 1983 and in Europe since 1992. Nakagawa is a Japanese citizen, born in New York City in 1962. Having lived in both Japan and America, he feels a stranger to both, and particularly in language, comfortable in neither. As a Japanese-American artist, he is concerned with cultural identity issues and the duality of his heritage. For Nakagawa, photography has become a method of communication and a visual language to express himself. Influenced by the success of other artists of combined heritage, such as Isamu Noguchi and Robert Frank; Nakagawa uses the struggle between his two identities as a point of departure in his work. In the Mado (Window) series, he photographed simple objects framed by a window, reminiscent of the poetic directness of Haiku. The Drive-In Theatre series also utilizes a frame within the frame of the photograph to further isolate and distance the viewer from the image. These photographs, reflect, somewhat like Frank's, The Americans, the artist-outsider as observer of cultural madness and malaise.