Patrick Nagatani, a Japanese-American who was born just days after an atomic bomb obliterated Hiroshima, his family’s hometown, and who devoted his photographic career to evoking the nuclear legacy of the adopted nation that interned his parents during World War II, died on Oct. 27 at his home in Albuquerque. He was 72.

His wife, Leigh Anne Langwell, said the cause was colon cancer.

Mr. Nagatani never enrolled in a technical photography course, but he had training in Hollywood making special-effects models for films (including “Blade Runner” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”) and adapted it to create phantasmagorical collages.

His constructions often juxtaposed photographs of military sites, monuments, Native Americans, Japanese tourists and self-images to suggest the contradictions of nuclear energy, the development of atomic weapons in the New Mexico desert and the environmental consequences of those weapons.