Real surreal
The personal gaze of Guido Castagnoli is able to carry very far, beyond tired cliches or beliefs led by a careless globalization that’s often incapable in returning the true face of places, their nature, the same language used by men to manipulate them to get to what they are. The small Japanese towns in this series define a landscape that the photographer from Turin loves to call “vernacular”, as far from the idea of extreme minimalism often associated with Japanese culture, as permeated by an atmosphere of quiet and refined suspension to make it warm and, almost, familiar, and yet still unknown. The total absence of human figures, the colors swollen of light and fixed air, and unlikely vanishing points become the accents and the cadence of the only dialect able to tell this story, in time.