Guido Castagnoli

Amusement Structure 2, Yaizu, Japan, 2007 Guido Castagnoli's images of small Japanese towns focus on familiar territory: there is other similar work floating around (Takashi Homma's work on suburban Tokyo stands out from the crowd), but the originality of Castagnoli's images is the light. These scenes of empty parking lots, amusement parks and all-but-abandoned main streets, tend to be shot in colder, more bleached-out tones. Castagnoli's images have a sun-drenched warmth that I haven't seen elsewhere. If provincial Japan was in 1970s California...