akashi Homma's Thirtyfour Parking Lots (2015) is a thoughtful reinterpretation of Ed Ruscha's iconic 1967 artist's book Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles. Rather than simply recreating Ruscha's project, Homma expands its conceptual framework, photographing parking lots across Japan, Brazil, Australia and Iceland. By shifting the geography while preserving the underlying idea, he demonstrates how the visual language of the automobile and urban infrastructure has become a global phenomenon.
Working in crisp black and white, Homma transforms these ordinary, overlooked spaces into carefully composed studies of geometry, rhythm and abstraction. Seen from above, painted lines, asphalt textures and the subtle traces of daily use become elegant graphic compositions. Cars are largely absent, allowing the structure of each site to emerge as the true subject and encouraging the viewer to consider parking lots as anonymous yet highly organised landscapes.
The book also reflects Homma's long-standing interest in the influence of photography on our perception of the built environment. While Ruscha documented the car-oriented identity of Los Angeles during the 1960s, Homma reveals how similar spatial patterns have spread across different cultures and continents. His photographs suggest that these functional spaces, despite their apparent banality, have become a universal architectural language shaped by mobility, commerce and modern urban planning.
Designed with the restraint characteristic of the best artist books, Thirtyfour Parking Lots avoids unnecessary narrative or visual excess. The sequence of images allows formal similarities and subtle differences to unfold gradually, inviting slow observation rather than immediate interpretation. In doing so, Homma pays tribute to one of the most influential Photography Books of the twentieth century while creating a work that stands confidently on its own, reaffirming his position as one of the most innovative voices in contemporary Japanese photography.
