Photographer colors ideas of healing

by: Erica Smithson

People have long held color in great esteem. Some people may spend hours every week deciding what colors go together to form our daily outfits.

In the 1970s, mood rings used color to reflect our moods. Now, the importance of color goes even deeper with the alternative medicine process of chromotherapy, which uses color and light to balance energy wherever a person’s body may be lacking it. Color has now reached a point of encompassing both our physical and emotional spheres.

Chromotherapy has been criticized for not having scientific verifiability; nonetheless, its roots stretch over a thousand years, when Persian philosopher Avicenna said that color can be of vital importance to diagnosis and treatment in his book, “The Canon of Medicine.”

It is this dichotomy, between spiritual belief in the practice and its scientific validity, that photographer Patrick Nagatani explores in his exhibit “Chromotherapy,” which runs in Snowden Library’s art gallery until March 25.

It is also the kickoff event of Lycoming College’s “Healthcare in America” symposium.

Nagatani has arranged his photographs in a smoke-and-mirrors type of way. While they depict chromotherapy sessions — people and animals lay out under colored lights — the artist says that he staged almost all of the scenes, almost in reference to the doubt of the color therapy’s effectiveness. Nagatani claims there is “nothing real” in the portraits.

Nagatani stated several reasons for fabricating his images. For one, it reflects the fact that chromotherapy is done more in the privacy of one’s home than in mainstream health clinics. Like many other alternative medicines, it may be seen as too “bizarre” for traditionalists.

For another, Natgatani finds typical medical imagery “banal. There is no spectacle.” Indeed many of the images are quite blunt in their realism. We see ordinarily private moments of patients recovering from procedures. Body parts appear to be sewn up. Nude bodies are exposed without censorship (some are the subject of medical observation by a team of doctors). Colored light shines on the intricacies of the human form, flaws and all.

Most importantly, Nagatani wants to use his collection of photographs as a commentary on the differences between Eastern and Western medicine.

According to Nagatani’s view, the typical Western medical process can be summed up as “cut and get dressed.”

Chromotherapy may be a different way of looking at healing, but it is much more personal, he said. Colors are designated with each body part in mind: green to relax the muscles, violet to stimulate the nervous system, and so on. Nagatani thinks of the process as just as technical as a surgeon making a series of incisions inside the body.

Chromotherapy is not the only non-traditional source of healing in the photos. Other healers, such as pets (like in “Mister Yoshitomi and Toki”) and family members are pictured alongside the patients undergoing their procedures.

Animals are also shown receiving chromotherapy (one of these is a horse in “Appaloosa Equilibration”) instead of being put under. These examples all show that cures are not limited to only what can be sliced and diced.

Just as all of the images in the exhibit are a study of chromotherapy, its uses and how it compares to more traditional medicine, it is also the study of the artist’s process. Nagatani has spent 33 years compiling and re-working the images he has created.

His conception of chromotherapy comes through inspiration from several sources, namely books. He became aware of the process (and the possibility of healing with alternative medicines in general) when he read Mary Anderson’s “Color Healing: Chromotherapy and How it Works.” Always wanting to build background knowledge of his subject, he decided to read up on it for years before he started playing around with the idea artistically.

However, just because the collection is now hanging on the walls of an art gallery, does not mean Nagatani has stopped the effort to spin his own idea of chromotherapy. He considers his depictions an “ongoing narrative” and new images crop up one right after the other.

The recent novel “Luka and the Fire of Life” by Salman Rushdie, which depicts the titular character exploring a world full of intense color and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s current study of chromotherapy (which brings the procedure out of the private sector and into mainstream science and also signals an overlap of Nagatani’s art and science) have served as recent inspirations.

Nagatani’s ideas — and his images — “propel themselves,” he said. When one comes, it will not be long until the next one does. Again, though, this is no assembly line of art, with each finished product ready to hang in the front of the store.

Nagatani says he enjoys learning at all stages of his creative process; he even challenges his own assumptions of what his images should look like as he incorporates his ever-expanding wealth of knowledge on the subject. And, perhaps in a nod to overcoming any medical obstacles that befall us (through whatever means), Nagatani enjoys “(embracing) accidents.”

As far as whether Nagatani himself actually believes in any validity of chromotherapy as a healing process, he prefers not to give a definitive answer. “I am an imagist,” he said, “not a chromotherapy practitioner.”

However, he does find it “interesting” and is open to the idea of it having some healing powers. What he wants instead is for the audience to form their own ideas, to “suspend disbelief” of any traditional conceptions of healing practices and view chromotherapy through extreme, almost fantastical, interpretations.

Even though Nagatani does not consider the scenes in his photographs “real,” nor does he have a definitive belief in the healing powers of chromotherapy, he has proven that traditional medicine and healing practices can be challenged and the realism of the images shows that the challenge should not be taken lightly. The exhibit is sure to be one of the standout viewpoints in the healthcare symposium.