Witness Trees + Indelible Structures Osamu James Nakagawa

Osamu James Nakagawa’s exhibition catalogue for Witness Trees and Indelible Structures traces the origins of American Truths, an ongoing photographic project rooted in a 24,888-mile pilgrimage begun in February 2022, on the 80th anniversary of Executive Order 9066. Two months after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the order that forcibly incarcerated approximately 125,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans in camps across the American West, stripping families of their land, homes, and livelihoods at the hands of their own government. Through portraits of living “witness trees” that silently observed confinement and images of deteriorating barracks, reservoirs, and monuments rendered as if dissolving or reemerging, the project visualizes how memory resides within landscapes and structures that resist erasure, confronting the suppression of inconvenient histories.