Marco Zanta

Slow and contemplative, then fast-paced and frantic, Marco Zanta's photographic eye roams the urban landscapes of Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto. Zanta shows us a Japan in which descriptions give way to images, in which memory and the senses are primary. Industrial worlds, religious faiths and constant contradictions unravel uninterrupted.

The photographic research offered by architectural photographer Marco Zanta focuses on contemporary industrial sites. Zanta has inherited and synthesized the language of Italian culture as well as the more recent and liberatory philosophies of contemporary American photography. His photography has previously been presented in the volume Venezia-Marghera: Photography and Transformations in the Contemporary City, published by Charta in 1997. This new book offers a comprehensive selection of Zanta's project, begun in the 1980s, to explore the changing landscape of the world of work. As critic Italo Zannier puts it: "Zanta...'sometimes enhances the clearness of detail with his large format camera, which imposes on him long, passionate, solitary reflections on the ground glass and which always stimulate him to search for implicitly existential structures, which in the end suggest melancholy, remoteness of spaces, Îspectralizations,' as the Futurist Tato would have said, looking at these pictures.''