There is a sense of the restlessness, transition and migration about the ‘Lights In Chicago’ street photography series of Satoki Nagata. A fleeting, flowing glimpse of Chicago at night and its residents. With some powerful undercurrents of existential fragility, these photographs are populated by ghostlike creatures who eerily wander the city illuminated in single frame shots. Haunting moments beautifully illustrated in his most famous collection of street photography to date.
“There is practically no limitations on the streets,” Nagata explains his love of street photography. “Images created from the photographers’ distinct point of view to capture the dynamics between humans and their created environments. The streets are created by us, humans. We alone have the ability to create, we lead our lives in the environments that we create. Thus, the points of creation and inhabiting are closely related. Street photography therefore is the attempt to capture these dynamics through photographic images, from the photographers’ individual and distinct point of view“
Satoki Nagata’s ‘Lights In Chicago’ hints at Life and death and the city, growth and decay in a physical sense, and in the concrete theatre of existence. The subjects shot as they cross the city at night as if they are semi- ghosts, spirits in a single frame digital reality merging with their urban surroundings. They possess a fleetingness that threatens to be swallowed up by the gaping mouth of the metropolis, just like life is swallowed up by age.
Copyright © Satoki Nagata
A woman in a check coat turns toward the photographer. She seems to be surprised by his presence, but she also appears to be merging – like a phantom – with the building behind her.
“What so fascinates me working on streets is that I realized that the streets are composed of multiple, complex emotional layers similar to our human experience” He explained. “Street photography takes me deeper, and I see images become different and better and the process of making images on the streets is the creative challenge that I like the most.”
Copyright © Satoki Nagata
There is one photograph which emerges as an amazing photograph of some complexity. A vision of heads within heads of people captured within and without as they move quickly around the city. Their existential time ticking down as they are shot in a microsecond.
“This is actually the first image I made for the ‘Lights In Chicago’ series in 2011,” He said of the complex multi-head shot. “I first started in traditional street photography. But then I thought ‘how can I minimise emotional distance without making intimate connections with people?’ I decided to use flash on the streets. Flash is a powerful tool to make intimate connection visually. When I made this image(above), I found that using flash has the potential to make the images I was looking for. The image showed visually fascinating layering and a range of rich tones from highlights to shadows which made the photograph look like a reflection or a multi-exposure but it was taken with a single shot.”
He pauses, wanders around in the silence of the moment searching for answers to the awfully big questions he poses himself.
“I used flash with transmitter and backlit the subject and took these photographs with a slow shutter speed,” He explained some of the techniques he used on ‘Lights In Chicago’. “Many factors had to be considered to achieve the right settings such as shutter speed, aperture, ISO, focus, flash power, flash angle, ambient light, and background. I need to think about distance between subject and flash, distance between me and the subject. Different settings makes different transparent effects on images.”
While ‘Lights In Chicago’ is to date, Satoki Nagata’s most successful project, it is only part of a large body of street photography work that the Japan-born, Chicago-based , former neuroscientist has created. But it leads with it’s undeniable uniqueness.
Copyright © Satoki Nagata
A woman head down strikes through air as she walks past a window full of sewing machines. Once again she has a transparent appearance like an apparition, like something dredged from our imaginations to fascinate, scare and terrify us.
“The theme of my work is people and their lives in Chicago,” He tells me candidly. “Which I capture through documentary, environmental portraits, and street photography.”
Copyright © Satoki Nagata
A man smoking is caught in the dazzling light of Satoki Nagata’s artwork, with what looks like ectoplasm (or is it cigarette smoke?) pouring out behind him.
Satoki Nagata’s photographs remind me of the idea of invisible text, that is within each frame there is narrative, a meaning that can be discovered and unpacked. His work is very human often dealing with the most profound of subjects – he created, for example, a documentary series of images of his sister’s funeral after she died in 2009.
As a street photographer he could be described as somewhat ‘unconventional’, but the work, I would suggest, speaks volumes for the man’s talent and brilliance.
‘Lights In Chicago’ is an original piece of art where each frame stands alone but, yet, can be seen as an organic whole. It is a somewhat enigmatic series, just like Satoki Nagata and his street photography art.
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