Osamu James Nakagawa’s new images center on the island of Okinawa and its “bantas,” the precipitous and breathtaking cliffs that still bear the scars of the intense battles waged during the Second World War. “For years I have carried with me a vivid memory of the first time I stood atop these cliffs – a memory of beauty in the endless blue expanse of sea and sky intensified by the fearsome height and history that met my downward gaze.” Utilizing digital juxtaposition and shifting perspective, Nakagawa’s views of the cliffs serve as pictorial metaphor for the tension between fear and beauty.
In Okinawa, the precipitous cliffs that fall hundreds of feet to the ocean below are called banta.
For years I have carried with me a vivid memory of the first time I stood atop these cliffs – a memory of beauty in the endless blue expanse of sea and sky intensified by the fearsome height and history that met my downward gaze.
Five years later this memory drove me to revisit and descend those very cliffs. Standing at their feet for the first time I felt in the cliffs’ full visceral weight, something so powerful that I was initially unable to take even a single photograph. The shadows seeping from the cliffs’ surface, the white craters riddling the cliffs’ coral limestone, and the charred black caves were stark reminders of all that these cliffs had witnessed.
I returned to my studio after six months of researching and exploring the South Pacific Theater with thousands of image files of the cliffs to piece together. As I re-shaped and re-experienced the original digital images, these cliffs became a metaphor for Okinawa’s history as well as digitally-manipulated, hyper-real vision of my experience standing between fear and beauty on Okinawa’s banta.
Osamu James Nakagawa