Ricardo Nagaoka

Photographer

Ricardo Nagaoka (b. 1993) is a Japanese-Latino photographer, born and raised in Paraguay, and a grandson of Japanese immigrants. He immigrated to Canada with his family during his teenage years, and eventually landed in the U.S to study at the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA in Photography). He currently lives and works in Portland, OR. Ricardo’s work has been published in The British Journal of Photography, The New York Times, and California Sunday Magazine, as well as having been recognized by The Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward and American Photography. He has shown his work nationally and abroad, and was recently in a show at Aperture. Growing up as an East Asian individual in a mostly homogeneous country, he was an outsider in his own homeland. His surroundings insisted on him to define his own agency early on, challenging his cultural and familial identities from a young age. Ricardo’s work seek to explore our constructs and ideas of home, heritage, and selfhood in this increasingly globalized world.