(born Oita, 1925)
As an editor for the magazine Shukan Sun News in the late 1940s, Nagano developed an interest in photography. He later worked as an editor for the Iwanami Photography Library, an extensive series of photographic pocket books documenting Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and other areas of Japan after the war. Nagano produced Hiroshima in 1952, one of the first publications to address the impact of the atomic bomb on Japan following the official end of American occupation.
Establishing his reputation as a freelance photographer by the mid-1950s, he became known for his postwar documentary work and his later focus on the social and psychological effects of economic growth and urban life. He continued photographing in this vein through the 1980s. Nagano worked as a cinematographer as well, most notably for Tokyo Olympiad in 1965, a documentary of the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo that is considered one of the greatest sports documentaries in history.