Nagatani was born in Chicago the year a nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the hometown of the family of his father, who had been interned during the war. Soon after moving to Albuquerque, Nagatani started Nuclear Enchantment, a photographic series intended to open the eyes of New Mexicans to the dangers of the state’s nuclear mining, research, and testing. He once said, “Like the macabre yet jewel-like images from medieval books of hours dealing with the Office of the Dead, I point a boney finger at the contemporary dance of death we are on the verge of joining.”

In this photomontage, Nagatani reproduces carp banners from a 19th-century woodblock by Ando Hiroshige to reference the state’s history of Japanese concentration camps. They wave in front of an abandoned open-pit uranium mine located within the Pueblo of Laguna. Historical inequities mean the state’s Native American population remains disproportionately affected by the environmental, health, and economic consequences of uranium extraction.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)