Satoki Nagata. Lights in Chicago

©Satoki Nagata
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I was born and raised in Japan and began to take photographs while I was in high school. After graduating Nagoya University with BS, MS and Ph.D. degrees in Neuroscience, I moved to the U.S. in 1992 and started using a SLR camera to photograph Chicago and its citizens.

Since living in the United States photography has become my passion. I have learned from Zen Buddhism that our existence is composed of various relationships. This notion has inspired me to use photography to create relationships with the world to find myself.

Although I have never received formal education in photography, I have studied documentary and fine art photography with photojournalist Damaso Reyes since 2009.

Since I moved here, I have been documenting ordinary people and their lives in the city of Chicago. Initially, I took photographs of people and streets of the city but then found I wanted to document people with more intimacy.

A few years ago, I began working on short-term documentary projects. My first long-term intensive documentary project was making photographs of people on Chicago Avenue near the Red Line station who were struggling with poverty and drug addiction. I photographed them on the street as well as in their homes for two years.

Through this project, I learned some of the people I photographed came from Cabrini-Green, which lead me to my next long-term documentary project “Cabrini-Green: Frances Cabrini Rowhouses”. Since December 2010, I have visited there three to four days a week and documented people living in the oldest part of Cabrini-Green.