The removal and internment of 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were American citizens happened in 1942. My parents, John Nagatani and Diane (Yoshimura) Nagatani were interned at Jerome and Manzanar. The ten concentration camps scattered throughout the United States in which the Japanese-Americans were interned retain memorials to those tragic years. To fully understand this black episode in American history, I needed to personally experience the sites where 7,000 to 10,000 internees were concentrated for more than three years. On these desolate places an entire city was created out of tar paper, green lumber, and army camp style facilities for young and old families, aged bachelors, the rich and poor. Mess halls, community toilets, baths, and laundries with paper thin walls between units in the long barracks was how these American citizens lived. They were thrown together in a random fashion to create a temporary community out of a most hostile and foreign environment. My approach to this work allowed me to be part historian, archeologist, geologist, cartographer, photographer, and the Japanese-American Sansei investigating what has long been a part of my cultural identity. What I discovered was personally twofold. It was an experience of the present, what exists now in the landscape of the camps. The old foundations, decaying structures, rusting nails, concrete fish ponds, rock gardens, farmed fields, dirty-dry desert, unused concrete water tanks, cemeteries, recently erected monuments and plaques, the surrounding mountains, the weather, and the silence. In all of my visits much of the later part of the working process (after having made pictures) meant just looking at the ground or sitting. At Topaz, I found among the thousands of rusting nails, a flattened and rusted child's tin truck. Close by a fully intact trilobite (from the Paleozoic period) was discovered. The present and the past linked. I could not help experience, observe, and record without linking the past with the work. I am intrigued with how things must have been and what informed the landscape and experience for those Japanese-Americans, victims of wartime hysteria and racism. Landscape retains memory. I felt the individual and collective memories that were inherent to all the camps in one way or another. Every camp is vividly etched in my mind and the images that I have selected for this portfolio are in a very small manner a way to share this personal experience. This work has been for me experiential and sentimental. I realize now, after having been to the ten camps, that the experience has been very important for me in further developing an understanding of my own cultural background. This work is dedicated to my parents and to the other 120,000 inmates, many who are still living, all having had to live at these places and whose memories I encountered.   -Patrick Nagatani   In addition to a vast array of varied life experiences, Patrick Nagatani earned his MFA from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1980. His first National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship was awarded to him in 1984. In 1988 he won the Leopold Godowsky Jr. Color Photography Award as well as the California Distinguished Artist Award from the National Art Education Association. In 1991 he earned the Outstanding Faculty Award from the College of Fine Arts, University of New Mexico; in 1992 he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Artist Fellowship. His book Nuclear Enchantment has received critical acclaim. At this point in his career, he is investigating popular culture and his own cultural past. He believes in synchronicity not fate. He is trying to take his streetwise upbringing where he was raised in Crenshaw, Los Angeles and the life learning experiences of living in a loft in downtown Los Angeles (where his son was born) and readjust his parameters. Somewhere between this and that or then and now, he wished to investigate in his work what it is to be living, looking back and simultaneously looking forward at this "fin de siecle."