2022 Image Equity Fellow: Ricardo Nagaoka

Ricardo Nagaoka is one of 20 Fellows who were awarded the inaugural Image Equity Fellowship. Learn more here.

Growing up in Asunción, Paraguay, as the grandson of postwar Japanese immigrants, photographer Ricardo Nagaoka found himself surrounded by narrow and patriarchal models of masculinity. “As I tried to perform that very form of masculinity,” Nagaoka says, “my body felt what it meant to be seen as less than because of my race.”

Through constructed images featuring close friends, chosen family, and collaborators, Nagaoka attempts to pry open masculinity’s historical and cultural baggage, as well as its performance, to push for a broader understanding of gender and queerness. His quiet and intimate imagery draws from personal experiences: “Whether it’s a memory of touch, a glimpse of a gesture, or a translation of my emotional state,” he explains, “my work relies on intuition during its making process.”

Nagaoka brings in a range of visual references and ideas when constructing his photographs—from the work of Catherine Opie, Masahisa Fukase, Sam Contis, and the twentieth-century Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu, to the broader legacies of New Topographics and the Pictures Generation.

After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2015 and then spending nearly a decade outside art education institutions—working with the New Yorker, TIME, and FT Magazine—Nagaoka will start his MFA at the University of California Los Angeles this year. “I want my work to continue these conversations, and to be contextualized within academic, institutional, and cultural understandings of how we define masculine performance,” he says.

Editorial statement by Aperture.

Explore the other 2022 Image Equity Fellows’ final projects and learn more about the Fellowship here.