Time Coded English Dialogue and Titles for Living in the Story

 

01:00:07:08   Ready? It’s time to hang the trinitite. At 5:29 in the morning, July 16, 1945, after the first atom bomb was exploded. The army goes in with Sherman tanks that’re lead-lined

00:28  and finds all this green rock. And what it is the sand that’s been fused by intense heat to form this greenish glowing rock and they called it trinitite.

 

01:00:36:07   And, it was all about really being there and then living it shooting the 4x5, getting the right depth of field, all this stuff, photography stuff,it was just work.

01:00:51:03   The magic was right there where I just said.  It was like living in the story.

 

01:00:57:02   Titles:

            LIVING IN THE STORY

Patrick Nagatani

Photographic Innovator • Storyteller • Artist

 

01:01:06:06   And I often would tell my students, when you make work, think about where the magic is. For me, it was like building the sets, that was magic for me

 

Titles:

01:01:15:22   NAGATANI-TRACEY POLAROID COLLABORATIONS   

                  1983-1989

01:01:21:18   In 1983, I was invited to use the 20x24 Polaroid camera. I wanted to explore the idea of Nuclear Holocaust.

01:01:30:16   I wanted to work with illusion and allusion, making obsessive works

that most artists can’t or don’t do.  

 

01:01:38:02       And that’s when I started thinking about I need to work with the painter, I needed these backdrops. I saw the production aspect of interacting with the camera

01:01:49:04       and invited Andree to collaborate. We were set designers; we were interested in theater; we were interested in the relationship of painting and photography together to form the illusions.

 

01:01:58:03       Title: Andree Tracey & Patrick Nagatani, Atomic Café Set, 1983

01:02:03:02       We also saw this work as being very much like being in theater, the way we set things up as stage directors.

01:02:11:23       I talked to Andrée about why don't we do something like along the idea of the instant photograph and make things in movement and make these things look like it was just an amazing moment when everything is frozen in this nuclear explosion.

01:02:28:16       And then my interests at that time was on my cultural background and, of course I modeled because it would be like a Japanese tourist kind of like ironically recorded this moment of a nuclear blast in downtown Los Angeles. 

 

01:02:44:07       We had no idea about the amount of time it was going to take. We just made it in about 6-1/2 hours and had about an hour and a half to make the edition.  

01:02:57:04       And then we developed this thing about red being the primary color - it seemed to represent on an emotional level, the heat and emotional subjectivity that red brings to both love and lust, and danger.

 

01:03:15:03       But mostly because red at that time with a polaroid, ER diffusion film, was like one of the strongest hues.

 

01:03:24:15       The depth of field of that Polaroid camera was about 18 inches, but I had worked in Hollywood, so I went force field prospective from film work and brought that to this work and so we were able to create this illusion of depth of field, like there was a great depth
of field

01:03:44:04       by the types of props we used, different sizes and nothing being really rectangular; but maybe being trapezoidal to develop this kind of great depth of field look

01:03:54:03       and these sets, we don't make them permanent, they have to last about thirty minutes – we make our edition and then tear it down and throw the thing away. The work is in not the sets, but it's in the 20 x 24 final product

 

01:04:14:00       In '85, 34^th and Chambers was the major piece we did. What we did was shoot all of these subjects … 4 x 5 and then we mounted them on foam core and then hand colored them.  The painting in the back is a big canvas that was rolled out for each shot.

01:04:34:08       and the pillars are foam core dropped in front of the canvas and the figures are all stacked in about four inches. We would just string them down with filament line, which the camera captured … we wanted to show façade. Our interest was to show the installation and not to create an image that was totally – totally believable;

01:05:00:19       but that you would go into this idea that this is a constructed moment as well as it represented this kind of like a fantastic, a real moment in time and we loved the triptych because they were shot at different times; but then again you are forced to look at a one-time moment. 

 

01:05:18:21   I shot my family in kimonas and had them reflecting in their glasses a nuclear blast going off. It would be like these Japanese enjoying their luncheon watching a nuclear blast go off. And that's me in the real sitting in the background there.

 

01:05:38:07   And I think Alamogordo Blues came as one of the last ones. And the beginning of that was the irony I saw in late 1948 photograph of these military guys sitting in Adirondack chairs watching a test go off. And I thought, What a cool picture. Let’s reconstruct this.

01:05:57:14   I built the Adirondack chair, and invited my brothers, Nick, Scott, and my dentist, Ken Nakama, I’m in the real, in the background. They had to be Japanese businessman type guys – white shirts. They came individually and I shot a 4x5 of them in the chair holding an SF70.

 

01:06:19:01       It also firmly established in my mind this idea of working in the directorial mode, arranging for the camera. it was an idea about what would be at some moment in time in almost a filmmaker fantasy realm,

01:06:38:00       it was about my development in thinking about what truth was in photography and from that point on for me through most of my life; I don't believe that there's any truth in photograph, it's just a reproduction of a moment.

 

 

Titles:

01:07:11:19   NUCLEAR ENCHANTMENT

                   1988-1993

01:07:18:21     At the end of the Polaroid work I was living in NM.

01:07:23:13     I was interested in pushing the idea of Nuclear Holocaust further, looking at things from an activist's point of view.

 

01:07:37:10       I saw New Mexico as being so layered culturally, but visible to industrial complex, military complex, the national labs to real pueblos and Native Americans existing
01:07:54:00       in the state to Hispanic culture to the military moving in and establishing Los Alamos and Kirkland Air Force Base and Holloman Air Force Base, all of those things I decided would be layered into the story.

 

01:08:13:00   I took the camera out of the studio.  I mean I continued to work in a directorial mode, but the camera actually went with me to the sites and I actually photographed landscapes for instance, uranium mines, for instance, Mortandad Canyon where it's radioactively polluted today.

01:08:36:03   My tactic was to go these sites that were almost non-descript.  You wouldn't know that that was a contaminated canyon unless you looked at my art work. Anything that’s apocalyptic visual-wise would be from my hand coloring of the big mural prints. I’d paint on in green paint the radioactive areas and so there was that - that part of the directorial mode and hand manipulation that told the whole story in my mind.

 

01:09:12:00   Two views of Ship Rock was part of the investigation into the three major uranium mining sites in New Mexico, on Navajo and Laguna reservations and this one is outside of Shiprock where today they still are dealing with medical issues with a lot of Native Americans as a result of the exposure to constant trailing deposits with radiation.

01:09:39:01   Shiprock being such a touristy, beautiful spot looking north, I photographed it and then looked south at the track homes of some of the mining families.

01:09:51:06   Of course, I add the red sky to create this kind of theatrical kind of horror and the green in the background is actually where the trailing deposits are.

01:10:02:20   This idea of reality varied in the Nuclear Enchantment work, I’m still constructing the narrative and, but even more so the beginning of the need for storytelling, through layering information, adding cultural positioning to it.

 

01:10:22:10   These are Koshare, Native American clowns. I love clowns because there is a seriousness to clowns. They can make fun of things, but underneath that laughter and making fun of it, there is a lot of truth to that. And this backdrop is about 4 x 5. It sat in my studio for the longest of times.

01:10:43:00   Sketches upon sketches of what was going to be in front of this scene. And it ended up that one morning while having breakfast at the Frontier I saw these Koshares and    photographed them – made color images – and they are not only collaged on but they are positioned in front of the backdrop and I thought them to be perfect.

 

01:11:04:00   In the early parts of Nuclear Enchantment I continued making the big mural backdrops and then two other directions took place, one was to shoot landscapes and make 30x40 or smaller images and hand color them and then to collage on the surface of those

01:11:23:23   and then actually go into the sites like in this B29 accident where a B29 with an atom bomb crashed on the base and so I found a back yard that faced these and took my Weber out there and the two chairs and lit the thing up so that - and I had a fan on the side to blow the flames over the exact area of where the B29 crashed into and then I strung up two models of F16 Thunderbolt, shot the image there right at the landscape.

01:11:59:00   I became more politically pointed in terms of um, the information in Nuclear Enchantment.

 

01:12:08:00   On the hillside driving away from White Sands there's a Nike Hercules missile right at the top there and I thought that how interesting that that's the monument that they constructed outside of White Sands.  and, I took all these Japanese, my son and myself and my dad, cousins and nieces and I built Nike Hercules missiles and had them hold them in their hands like they are paying homage.

 

01:12:38:10   When you go to the Bradbury Museum, this is what you see: The talk about weapons concepts. Here’s an interesting one: the effects of nuclear weapons, and there’s no people in it though. It doesn’t show any victims from Nagasaki or Hiroshima.

01:12:55:20   That was in my mind when I saw it. This is all very interesting scientifically, but what does it have in terms of humanity? My vision was to put these beakers here of ashes, white ashes, and Japanese people’s names and ghost figures of children to present another display in the museum that they should have.

 

01:13:21:05   This would take out a lot of people. It is one of the largest bombs that an aircraft could drop –This is an arsenal of some things I have made. An F-15 from Holloman Air Force Base with a couple of sidewinder missiles, two F1-11Ds that fly out of Cannon Air Force Base, all aircraft that have flown out here in the skies of NM. Then we have some of the missiles and bombs I have built. I’m interested that the development of one of these television-guided missiles would fund the Albuquerque school system for probably the next two years.

01:13:59:07   Here’s the entire sports program for the state of New Mexico, football uniforms for everybody. Let’s take the homeless out of the streets with one of these. Essentially I’d say if you took all these little plastic things here and what they represented and take the aircraft too, if they represented money, you could probably Essentially feed the people of the world with what is represented on this table, and feed them for probably a year.

 

01:14:35:22   And so some of those images were tougher, they still had a sense of humor I thought. But, um, you know were a little bit tougher and today I would make them even more tougher …even more politically pointed

 

01:14:53:12   Nestled in the beautiful hills up by Bandelier is Las Alamos…I think in NM we are a state that has all this stuff - like an air force base right next door to a Native American reservation; a little city of ordinary working class people and then a weapons lab for theory and development occurring right there. And that's actually a trailing deposit at Laguna - the danger of radioactive sign I had to put on the barb wire fence, they have nothing posted.

 

01:15:30:00   This is, for me, the future unless we rectify some things. This is Carlsbad Caverns. The bats come out of Carlsbad at night. The WIPP site is very close to Carlsbad. The title for this is – it’s French – Fin De Siecle, the end of the century.  This is the future for me, it about where the bats becoming even radioactive.

01:15:52:23   The bottom line for this work is that I hope that … maybe we will leave some kind of a planet here for the young people in the future.

 

01:16:02:05   I took this work when it was finished to my mentor, Robert Heinecken. And so he said to me that at some point in my work I might want to separate those issues that I was engaging in a single photograph and at that time I was just engaging myself in the investigation of the Japanese American relocation camps of World War II andHeineken's comments made me rethink that work.

 

 

Titles:            

01:16:33:20   “The Land has Memory”

                          N. Scott Momady

01:16:42:10  JAPANESE AMERICAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS

                  1993-1995

01:16:50:00   The images of the ten camps for families are strictly photographic documentation.

                        It was a different kind of narrative,
                        about landscape, memory, and family history.

 

01:16:50:00     It was, I guess you could say, photographic truth, which I’m the antithesis of it in many ways.  I pulled back everything. I pulled back the theatricality of it, the scale of them, So they were only 11x14 and there's a lot more to that work on a personal level than the camps themselves.

01:17:30:22   I shot them with the landscape, the horizon, dead center for the most part throughout - at all the camps because I wanted to balance the kind of sky and landscape together; but I also wanted to connect them when they went up on the wall to one idea, one landscape; but in different places.

 

01:17:52:00   There were ten camps where families were placed and then there were justice camps of which there were four and these were just - they were prison camps in a way and they were all men, Japanese-Americans and some Japanese Nationals, who were community leaders, priests, newspaper guys, kind of like the leaders in the community.

 

01:18:15:04   My grandfather was in the Japanese military in the Japanese Russian war. Of course, the FBI knew about this, and even though my grandfather was a grocery store owner at the time, they came on December the 8^th, and he was seen as one of the big threats.My mom’s oldest brother, Uncle Jim, had to take control of the family and they were relocated to Manzanar.

01:18:39:00   He ultimately got my grandfather released from Santa Fe and sent to Manzanar to be with his family. Meanwhile, my mother had left.

 

01:18:50:17   My father was in Arkansas. He just wanted to get out of the camp because my grandfather on the Nagatani side died in Arkansas. And both of them, not knowing one another, got what was called early release and they both found sponsors in Chicago. My Mom and Dad met on a blind date, got married and I was the first-born.

 

01:19:17:01   I’ve always been this kind of outsider. This oddity in this group. You know, I never really knew I was different than any of these other guys until some of the kids told me I was different. 51 Polish American kids and Japanese American kid. I did later become Catholic to kind of conform, but that didn’t seem to work.

 

01:19:41:07   I started making model airplanes at that time. I made this ME109 and I still remember flying it out there and having these landing strips out in the city dumps and imagining myself landing and walking around, looking at stuff and then flying back. So, this whole sense of like creative fantasy was there all the way to, you know, my adulthood and working as an artist in photography.

 

Title:

01:20:07:11   Public Art, L0s Angeles MTA Mural, 1995

 

01:20:08:02   I was making trips to the ten camps and photographing for the first time in a very long time, using the camera to do a 180 degree turn around, and expect my audience to believe that these were the camps, these were the landscapes as they were fifty years later.

01:20:28:11   It was at a time when the Sansei generation, my generation, the third generation of Japanese in America, the young guys, were starting to get our parents, who were in the camps, to talk about the camps, where before they didn’t want to talk about it because they thought they were shameful.

01:20:47:02   My brother and some of the Japanese American Activists were starting to organize a pilgrimage to the camps to clean them up and get national historical markers on them. So, this whole movement, I became a part of that.

 

01:21:03:00       I am making these relocation camp images, not manipulated in anyway, trying to make them as simple as possible and truthful as possible.

01:21:11:12       I mean, I did plan when I went to these sites on going to them under the extreme conditions that the people lived there under.  For instance, the Gila River in Arizona got to be like 110 degrees there and so I went in the summer and I wanted that feeling of heat and up in Minidoka in Idaho, they have to go through some severe winters; with very little heating components.  So I went in the winter and sure enough it was like, you know, pretty dark and cloudy.  So, there was that kind of preplanning. 

01:21:47:07       The formation of the horizon and center is one of the only things that I worked out, but it was all contextual, actually.  Like, for instance, I wanted to get railroad tracks in some of shots, like at Heart Mountain, at Tule Lake and Amache because that's the way the people were transported into the camps.

 

01:22:09:02       And one of the things that I discovered at one of these camps was a toy, a tin car in Topaz that had been flattened. It was one of the purest artifacts that I had found in the camps after 50 years they've been stripped of artifacts. But this, the sand had blown away and there it was, this rusted tin truck, and I photographed it. I thought about artifacts and things left in the landscape, the idea of images in the landscape not topically but beneath and the stories that they told, thinking like an archaeologist might think.

 

01:22:50:21       Native American writers talk about landscape retaining memory, that it actually has memory attached to it, and if you are there long enough at time you can feel it, if you're sensitive enough to it.

 

Titles:             NOVELLAS

01:23:10:05   1992-2004

01:23:23:00   I think everyone needs a balance.

After years of obsessive reading about nuclear issues;

01:23:31:16   I turned to fiction, embracing Gabriel Garcia Marquez, magic realism and

the surreal in fiction.

 

01:23:51:00       Of course, I gravitated to Marquez because of the lack of technology and concern, and the aspect of humanity. So, I did this thing called Novellas where I would like make five images and using photographic technology that best facilitated the ideas to those images - but just make five and go on to the next idea and all of those ideas though were kind of magical realist.

 

01:24:17:07       I went to Polaroid and got to use the 20 by 24 camera again, and I did five of things associated with my favorite newspaper World Weekly News. About crazy events and the use of photography to prove that aliens were, had landed, or that the Hubble had discovered God’s headquarters in the universe, or Satan’s image was found and here’s visual proof. They always had that on the newspaper. So I love that idea of photography verifying truth.

 

01:24:56:08       I subscribed to, in my obsessive way of working to every body builder magazine on the planet, cut them out, collaged them, re-photographed them. I was interested in old 1920’s advertising.I reinvent myself constantly with these projects and it's usually from, you know, what I'm interested in reading at the time or just that I need a change.

 

Title:               RYOCHI/NAGATANI EXCAVATIONS

01:26:03:10  1985-2001

 

Title:

01:26:06:02     Ryoichi’s Journal

01:26:06:15     Showa 60, July 13th USA, Tucson, Arizona.

The location maps that Asushi and I were given from the Shaman last night seemed to have a particular order.  It is not entirely clear to us but twelve locations are decipherable.  They are metallic maps with coordinates similar to our longitude and latitude system, but different.  The remaining 36 plates are not readable at this time. Kangi, our cartographer, has surmised that perhaps by putting two together in an overlay the remaining maps might make sense. 

01:26:45:18   The leather satchel of maps and the experiences this day have left us feeling unsettled and in a dreamlike shrouded puzzle.  Our scientific and technological selves have been challenged and disrupted.

 

01:27:02:02   I should probably start in terms of, how the excavation work came about, and how I met the Japanese archeologist, Ryoichi, and was lucky enough to accompany his group to photograph the archeological sites.

01:27:17:20   So, I originally, found out about Ryoichi, I met him at a casino, there aren’t that many Asian people at these tables and naturally, we kind of hit it off, he spoke English.

 

01:27:30:15   Ryoichi and two of his associates Kenji and Asushi from Japanese television came to the United States in June of 1985, to video document the pow wow at the Crow Agency in Montana. it was there that they found a BMW on a burial scaffolding, which they found very interesting, so, through further investigation, they learned of a time and place that a Lexus car was going to be burned in a fire pit in Arizona.

01:28:01:00   They were not allowed to video tape the burn itself, only the aftermath. That evening, while returning on the deserted back roads leading to Tucson, where they were staying, they came across an automobile accident, it was actually a pickup, involving an older shaman. It was here that Ryoichi was given a satchel of maps from the dying shaman, and this is where the adventure actually began.

 

01:28:29:00   It was Ryoichi’s estimation that these were not made on this planet, that they were maps from an alien culture. And they were able after two years to decipher what these maps read, and found that they were to thirty sites around the planet earth, where something was buried.

 

Title: Ryoichi’s Journal

01:28:55:05   Showa 61, Kyoto

Our archeological team of 13 are willing to accept this quest and we are preparing for what might be a 14-year journey that will be both lonely and intense.  The excitement among us is clear, perhaps we will emerge with some sense of scientific meaning at the close of this century.

01:29:17:15   Our intentions are to retrieve what we find quickly and restore the sites. Our work will not be revealed to the scientific community until the sequence of the maps is fulfilled.  This is truly the adventure of our scientific lives. 

 

01:29:35:00   It was a movement away from the way scientists examine information. The whole project is about, in a way, who writes with authority about time and cultures. I’m interested in the way artifacts are presented in like museums. And how curators and writers write about cultures from the display of these artifacts.

01:30:03:12   And so, you see an Anasazi pot and you read the text and it is the culmination of Anasazi civilization, this pot making. And I just sit there and think that, what if this was like the lousiest pot maker in that pueblo?

 

01:30:25:18   The excavation work became an encapsulation of a lot of stuff on my mind like luxury cars and car culture and aliens and Roswell and the landscape, what exists below and what exists above simultaneously to the idea of time expanding and not exactly a linear fashion as we know it; but in terms of your ability to loop time and create in a single moment two time events.

01:30:59:18   And then I love to build models, so that all became this just became a juxtaposition of like all this craziness, but in a final analysis was about photographic representation in the sciences.  

 

01:31:25:08   I chose Jaguars at two places, the more important one would be at the Caracol in Yucatan because I shot the observatory at Yucatan, but in my research I found that  open arena that the back was a temple of the Jaguar.  

01:31:45:17   I wanted to use ancient sites in these digs, number one; and I wanted to use sites that defined in a way the cultures, the ancient cultures in these various continents; number two, and third, I wanted to use archeological and astronomical sites that were important today and in ancient times and besides on every continent I wanted to have a car buried.

 

01:32:16:23   I started to look at the vegetation and the quality of earth and the light at these places where I was constructing the digs and that was part of the research besides

01:32:31:14   thinking about how I would photograph them and how the car would be buried and what type of structure the burial pit would be as in relationship to the ancient cultures that existed at that time.

 

01:32:46:20   Title: Ryoichi’s Journal

Thus far, we have accomplished nine excavations.  Our excitement at each find intensifies, … We have found an automobile at each site. The automobiles are mostly luxury cars with hardly any mileage and remarkably preserved.  There is some kind of coating to protect them from the elements. 

01:33:06:06   The initial AMS radio carbon data testing and dendrochronological testing of wood found in the first dig at Cahokia and the fourth dig at Olduvai Gorge have indicated that the cars were buried in differing centuries. By our existing concept of time as a linear progression, what we have found is not possible.

 

01:33:27:06   The most interesting for me as the artist was a sequence of mental things that occurred to me and the first would be all theoretical, here's the camera, this is the size of the set, this is what I want to construct, what do I need to learn in terms of even molding techniques, and then that evolved into, once the set was kind of like on its way

01:33:56:16   to actually believing that this place existed and putting myself into where would I put these footprints, where would be the movement of Ryochi in this dig and I had various footprints carved out of different sizes from wine corks and I would like, you know, think that through and put those things down there and it was all about really being there.

 

Title: Ryoichi’s Journal

01:34:29:09     Some kind of psychological turning point occurred after the excavation at Nagi Gompa in Nepal. This psychological twist involves half of the team's reluctance to remove the automobiles as we have crated and shipped back the others.  The dismantling of the Anatazi walls at Chetro Ketl was unsettling.  Possession seems to be unimportant.  We left a BMW at excavation 27. 

01:35:00:03   Another dilemma has been the fact that our mere presence and desecration of the secret sites seems wrong, even in the name of science.

 

Title: Ryoichi’s Journal

01:35:09:22   Aluru Rock, Australia, May 17th, 1999. 

The key to the sequences seems to be at Uluru, yet digging into the earth would be similar to scaring the culture itself. One aspect of what we have learned is that the quest itself has revealed to us the value of mystery and questioning. Rather than find an answer, the puzzle remains intact, and that is enough. We will not dig at Uluru.

 

01:35:43:10   If fiction has given to us more than fact, then this is the greatest truth. The idea of the artifact revealing any kind of truth seems irrelevant. Perhaps this is what the ancient ones who buried these automobiles and provided location maps hoped the outcome would be.

 

Titles:

01:36:09:23       CHROMATHERAPY

                            1980-2014      

01:36:18:07       For over a quarter of a century, I have gathered research on the "medical" practice of colored light healing.

01:36:25:00       I am not a color healer, I am a color imagist.

01:36:32:03       I am interested in making metaphorical colored art photographs that creatively haunt the viewer.  

  

01:36:40:00       I found this book called The Power of the Rays. It talked about healing the body with colored lights in terms of like that practice coming from ancient times to the present and it was kind of like a cult healing, you know, and I went wow.  I'm looking for some project, this is it. I'm interested in color, photography, lights, healing, it's got it all.

 

01:37:08:04   Typically, I read a lot, about what I’m doing, and I renamed my body of work Chromatherapy.

01:37:15:06       My choice of color, it was broad, because sometimes I would use a color that was significant in the practice of Chromotherapy to use with that particular part of the body.

01:37:32:04       Sometimes I would look at the range of pictures I had made and go “Goodness – I need a yellow one,” so I’d use a yellow ray you know, to balance out the work. But in Transmission, I literally took my strobes and changed the filter, the color filter on it and went around the entire set – poof, poof, poof.

01:37:38:10       It was like a mixture of light that took place. Literally like painting with light.

 

01:38:05:00     And Heineckin pulls me aside in 1980 and says to me, I want you to start doing some other work.  He guess he saw an idea-oriented photographer that was capable of doing a lot of other things and he didn't want to see me get focused for the rest of my life on this so I stopped. I guess, 20 years later I did more Chromatherapy shots.

 

01:38:35:10       Even constructing images back to Kill Bill, like with idea of this beautiful nurse applying Chromatherapy to this guy in a bathtub, along the lines of the Kill Bill film. I thought that was so visual and interesting and bizarre.

01:38:51:00       In 2005, I had my colonoscopy and found that I had colorectal cancer, had surgery, and then was  presumed to be clear after that surgery, ended up with an ostomy. But the idea of healing became even more, kind of interesting to me, personally involved because before that I was always looking for subjects, that who would get Chromatherapy.

01:39:17:17         Betty Hahn with her arthritis and dealing with that, it was so visible. The idea of healing became a little bit more important. and I saw myself as a patient.

 

01:39:29:17       The only picture I’ve made in 2014, as I’ve been re-diagnosed with colorectal cancer, eight years later, while I’m receiving chemotherapy I made this picture of myself receiving chemotherapy and my idea here is that, and I've had to deal with it in many ways, to be psychologically embracing the moment I’m happy but in order to make a picture of myself receiving chemotherapy, I had to remove myself from the subject, and I had to create a fantasy image.

01:40:07:14       So the fantasy image in this last Chromatherapy shot, is of myself, surrounded by three beautiful young women fanning me and one of them is applying, is applying a red Chromatherapy light simultaneously to my getting the chemotherapy from up above to my port, where I’ve received my Chromatherapy, my chemotherapy, see I'm mixing the two, for the last year and a half.

01:40:42:00       So, the piece is entitled, Chemotherapy/Chromatherapy. And the dude, see I call him a dude now, it's Ryochi, uh, me, is like just, smiling, and of course Photoshopped so he looks like pretty healthy. They let me shoot it at my oncology office. It's a cool shot.

01:41:05:11       And even my oncologist wanted a copy. I think he wanted to show his future patients, this is good stuff! Ha Ha. Right. I'll have a word or two with him.

 

Titles:

01:41:23:17               TAPE-ESTRIES

1982-2010

01:41:34:10               The taping process is obsessive.

I want magic in my life and work.

Beauty is important.

The Zen of the material and process moves me to a spiritual happiness.

 

01:41:51:09   It was probably the most meditative work that I've ever done. It was important for me to meditate and relax the mind, just being in a studio and locked in there and just putting tape down,

01:42:06:19   somewhere along the line it just becomes manipulative and I lose track and I just do it and, you know, hours pass and then I realize, wow, that was pretty cool.

 

01:42:23:10   In my younger years, I was always thinking about context and about the importance of the work, I would just do a taping project and think about what the big next big project would be. 

01:41:35:09   But in 2000, around then, I was dealing with a few things on a personal level, like losing my parents, and talking to like their Buddhist Monk, so my idea about making works started to shift.

 

01:42:49:14   There was an interesting chapter in Barbara Maria Stafford's book, Body Criticism, on dactylology. It was all about communicating with the hands. 

01:43:01:09   So, I became interested in things like the Olympics in Mexico, the Black Panthers, Richard Nixon on top of the airplane he was leaving with his hands up, and then baseball players giving hand signals, and ultimately,

01:43:14:05   the idea of Buddhist Iconography. And so all those hand movements mean something and so I got into that and the Tape-est pieces at that time were completely covered, but the hands were revealed.   

 

01:43:28:17       Ultimately, I became interested in my parents passing on and their involvement in Buddhism and my interest in the idea of the philosophical aspect of Buddhism in the world today, rather than Buddhism’s dogma.

 

01:43:47:18         Tibetan Buddhism has a ton of bodhisattvas and I became interested in that and started looking at the imagery and decided this would be really interesting to develop in terms of the Tape-estry work and I became interested, specifically, in the bodhisattva of compassion

01:44:08:20         and that started interesting me in terms of female deities and, of course, I evolved to China where the shift occurs from the male God of Compassion to the Goddess of Compassion with Quan Yin.

 

01:44:27:09   The Tape-est application evolved throughout the 30 years of my doing it And there always were these moments in these tapestry pieces that I would start and two things would enter my mind was, what the hell am I doing here applying this masking tape when a month from now the tape in theory is just going to crack and fall off this piece,  you know, there's no longevity to it –

01:44:52:00   and that's where the coating came in to preserve them.My first coating is kind of like almost water, it's a matte medium real liquid finish and it soaks through the tape and goes to the print. I use a brush and I apply it vertically, let it dry and then a thicker coat of matte medium goes down.

 

01:45:17:12       The importance of the Tape-estry work was that – it  wasn't so much the ideas, but it was for me as the artist the process of cutting tape, not thinking about time, because it takes a lot of time,     

01:45:30:17   if I thought about time when I was taping, I wouldn't do them because it's kind of insane the amount of time that it takes to you know cut about 2000 pieces of tape and put it down.

01:45:46:06       Yes, I would think about the deity that I was Photoshopping and help making alive and then applying and covering totally the deity to make it even more, surreal in a sense, behind a veil of masking tape. And even the masking tape became less just of a covering, but more of an image-making device

01:46:06:13       I used and studied every type of existing masking tape in the world and had it as my painting palette, and did this for about eight years every day of the week. I became so needing  that time period, of just clearing my mind and taping. doing these Tape-estries.

01:46:28:20       There is an aspect in terms of like Buddhism about living in the moment and appreciating little things in the moment. That’s my mind-set these days.

 

 

Book Cover: 

01:46:46:00               THE RACE:

                           TALES IN FLIGHT  

                           Patrick Ryoichi Nagatani

 

Titles:            

01:46:49:22   The novel is a collaboration between creator, director and
                        co-author Patrick Ryoichi Nagatani and 9 writers. 

01:46:57:16   Archeologist Ryochi helps excavate WWII-era Spitfire airplanes in Burma for Keiko Kobahashi, Mitsubishi CEO.   

01:47:06:18   Keiko transforms 15 into state-of-the-art floatplanes and

selects 15 international women pilots to race from Tokyo to San Francisco.

01:47:19:03   The challenge of the flight propels each pilot to come to terms with personal issues as she flies alone in the vastness of earth, space, water, and clouds.

 

01:47:30:00                In my thinking about these pilots and the story and the narrative, I decided to make the images for the book first and so and that started to shape the writing.

01:47:43:00                The real story is not about the race; it's about how women need to regain positions of power as mankind, man has failed. So the book is about saving the world through these strong women.

 

01:48:02:05               You know, when you're up in the sky and in control, there's a certain kind of meditative place where there's nothing else that matters.

01:48:13:15               All of these pilots, these women pilots, they all have something they are dealing with and all of them come to a catharsis during this time, and their helped along by some of my surreal aspects in the writing.

 

Title:

01:48:28:03       As their individual catharses occur, they imagine their contribution to

                            humanity and embrace the idea joining with the other pilots in Keiko’s                                                     Utopian community.

 

01:48:38:10       This novel is in a way a collaborative event as well, I have presented the ideas as kind of like the director. And often people say, wow do these women exist? And it is because of how I talk about them that they do. I have had to make them exist in my mind. I think authors become their characters.

 

01:48:59:11       So I am interested in kind of like this time space/relationship and what happens to human thinking, but more importantly, it's about that catharsis that one almost can't come to unless you've got this vast emptiness to be yourself, to think to yourself, come to terms with things, and that's what pilots have on long flights.

 

 

01:49:27:12       So that at the end of this flight, what's going to happen in the epilogue is their involvement in a greater idea of saving the world. And they are going to start leading the way to creating change. That is the idealism at the end of this book.

 

Title:

01:49:47:19       Dedicated to PATRICK NAGATANI

                            1945-2017

 

Credits:

01:49:57:04

Featuring:

Patrick Nagatani

 

Producers:

Lynn Estomin

Miguel Gandert

Patrick Nagatani

Andrew Smith

 

Director:

Lynn Estomin

 

Cinematographer:

Miguel Gandert

 

Composer/Music Producer:

Scott Nagatani

Vocals:

Keiko Kawashima

 

Editor:

Lynn Estomin

 

Post Production:

Matthew Davis 

editfreak cut/fx

 

Audio over Credit Roll

01:50:38:10               I can’t count cards anymore. I don’t have that ability to concentrate, but I have another ability and that’s kind of an intuitive aspect of, from the chemotherapy. and so, I have been more successful at gambling these days

 

Interviewers:

Andrew Connors

Miguel Gandert

Michele Penhall

Andrew Smith

 

Sound Engineers:

Tim Breon

Matthew Davis

Austin Gorrigan

Hiro Morozumi

 

Animators:

Lynn Estomin

Daniel Nienhuis

 

Photographs/Additional Footage:

Patrick Nagatani

Lynn Estomin

Linda Old Horn

KNME-TV Albuquerque

Library of Congress

Periscope Film LLC

Palace of the Governors Photo

Archives (NMHM/DCA) PA-MU-233.2

Los Alamos National Laboratory

VideoBlocks

 

Funding:

Lycoming College Professional Development Grant

Women’s Film Project

Andrew Smith Gallery

 

Thanks to:

Albuquerque Museum

Chris Bastress

Michael Burnham

Randi Ganulin

Tina Garnanez

Tony Heriza

Rose Hodges

Claire Lozier

Monica Serafini

Barbara Wolf

 

Books and Website:

 

Patrick Nagatani: Photographs

 of Buried Car Excavations

Museum of New Mexico Press

 and Albuquerque Museum, 2018

The Race: Tales in Flight

Fresco Books and Albuquerque Museum, 2017

Desire for Magic: Patrick Nagatani 1978-2008

UNM Art Museum, 2010

Nuclear Enchantment

University of New Mexico Press, 1991

Patrick Nagatani/Andree Tracey: Polaroid 20X24 photographs: 1983-1986

Gallery Min,Tokyo, 1987

 

www.patricknagatani.com

 

 

Patrick Nagatani dedicates this film to those

who have supported his life and work:

 

LEIGH ANNE LANGWELL and the NAGATANI FAMILY

 

Nick Abdalla, Fay Abrams, Jonathan Abrams, Marie Acosta, Bill Adams, Erika Adams,

Laura Addison, Karen Alarid, Matt Alexander, Jasmine Alinder, Greg Allen, Julie Anand,

Lea Anderson, Todd Anderson, Justine Andrews, Joy Avritt, Elena Baca, Babette Baker,

Kristen Barendsen, Thomas Barrow, Steve Barry, Jayne H. Baum, Terry Bendt, Carol Bjerke,

Rebecca Blankley, Jeanean Bodwell, Bruce Bohannan, Peter Briggs, Gillian Brown,  Kirsten Pai Buick, Elizabeth Burns, Jack Butler, Rita Butler, JoAnne Callis,  Fellisia Cappeletti, Julie Cardoza, Alison Carey, Laurel Caryn,  Meaghan Cavanaugh, Nanibah Chacon, Mark Chamberlain, Carl Chiarenza, Judy Chicago, Christine Chin, Esther Churchill, Patrick Clancy, Peter Clothier, Mathew Cohen, Paige Coleman, Andrew Connors, Sherri Crider,

Guy Cross, Darryl Curran, Scott Davis, Janet Dees, Mario Deflice, Robert Del Tredici, 

Charles Desmarais, Hisako Deyama, Tomoki Deyama, Nell Dickerson,  Anita Douthat,

Maxwell Duryea, Colin Edgington, Michelle Evans, Peggy Favour, Chris Fenton, Robert Flick,

Harris Fogel, Justin Frankel, Linny Frickman,  Kip Fulbeck, Kathryn Funk, Randi Ganulin,

Ellen Garvens, Kathy Gauss,  Deborah Gavel, Shelley Gazin, Bill Gilbert, Hamidah Glasgow, Judith Golden, Elijah Gowin, Ray Graham, Dorothy Grandbois, Jessica Gross, Moriniere Gwladys, Marcella Hackbardt, Betty Hahn, Alex Haidos, Suzanne Hale, Laurie Hall,

Jaimey Hamilton, Robert Heinecken, Melvin Higashi, Robert Hirsch, Barbara Hitchcock,

Irene Hoffman, Becky Holtzman, Graham Howe,  Kathleen Howe, Scott Hughes, Jim Hugunin,

Jessica Hunter Larsen, Basia Irland, Karen Ishizuka, Ethan Jackson, Zig Jackson,

Megan Jacobs, Frances Jakubek, Gary Jefferson, Greg Jein, Mark Johnstone,

Feroza Jussawalla, Christopher Kaltenbach, Michael Kamins, Wendy Kawabata, Jyl Kelley,

Arif Khan, Dorie Klein, Robert Klein, R. Skip Kohloff, Martha Koplin, Cal Kowal, `

Kelly Ann Kowalski, Jeff Kruger, Bill Lagattuta, Bree Lamb, Ann Landi,  Ellen Landis,

Sarah Langwell, Rod Lazorik, Bill Lende, Jeff Leuschel, Evanne Levin, Richard Levy,

Shira Lheureux, Lucy Lippard, Laurie Liss, Francine Lucey, Ruthie Macha Petty, Sushi Machida, Mary  MacNaughton, Beverly Magennis, Luci Maki, Julia Mandeville, Terry Martin,

Nancy Matsumoto, Sara McClure, Bonnie McLeskey, Therese McMahon, Larry McNeil,

Christopher Mead, Tom Merchant, Joy Miller, Kris Mills, Kimiko Miyoshi, Theresa Morani,

Hannah Morehead, Ginny Morrison, Tim Mulane, Jen Mullineks, Joan Myers, Gerry Nagatani,

Methuen Nagatani, Nick Nagatani, Scott Nagatani,  Tony Nagatani, Wendy Nagatani,

Osamu James Nakagawa, Kenneth Nakamura, Jennifer Nehrbass, Joyce Neimanas,

Raymond Nelson, Robert Nishimura, Curtis Nishiyama, Chris Nitsche, Joan O’Bierne,

Titus O’brien, Tricia O’Keefe, Arthur Ollman, John Olsen, David Ondrik, Sara Otto-Diniz,

Michael Ozaki, Emi Ozawa, Eugenia Parry, Antonella Pelizarri, Michele Penhall, Chad Person,

Kimberly Pinder, Sheila Pinkel, Marilyn Pocious, Cecilia Portal, Thomas Powell, Laura Pressley, Bart Prince, Wesley Pulkka, Susan Rankaitis, Scott Rankin,  Mary Anne Redding, John Reuter, Dolores Richardone, Tom Richardson,  John Rohrbach, Debra Romero, Elaine Roy, Valerie Roybal, Meridel Rubenstein, Andre Ruesch, Jeff Ryan, Ulrike Rylance, Betty Saar, Leanne Sacramone,  Nancy Salem, Suzanne Sbarge, David Scheinbaum, Martha Schneider, Merry Scully, Rebecca Senf, Masumi Shibata, Yoshiko Shimano, Judy Shintani, Dustin Shum, Alexis Smith, Aline Smithson, Jim Snitzer, Susan Spiritus,  Sally Stein, Jim Stone, Michael Stone, Tracey Storer, Susan Streeper,  David Stuart, Joyce Szabo, Mariko Takeuchi, Barbara Tannenbaum,  Paula Tognarelli, Andree Tracey, Joe Traugott, Karen Truax, Mary Tsiongas, Gabrielle Uballez, Linda Upton, John Upton, Ian Van Coller, John Vazquez, Arnold Venti, Bonnie Verado, Scott Vlaun, Emanuel Dimitri Volakis,  Michael Volz,

Deborah Wait, Tara Walch, Johnny Walker, Melanie Walker,  Peter Walsh, Chip Ware,

Kate Ware, Kazuhiko Watase, Joel Weishaus,  Jeff Weiss, Jerry Wellman, Sarah West,

Teri Wheeler, Gwen Widmer,  David Wilde, Jeff Willis, William Wilson, Sue Wilson Beffort,

Aaron Winston, Michael Woodcock, Donald Woodman, Cathy Wright, Ting Xu, Victor Yamada,

James Yamazaki, Steve Yates, Jennifer Yazawa

 

01:51:56:18               ©Women’s Film Project 2018