Silicon Valley '07
By Sandra Phillips and Filippo Maggia (Skira, Milan)
In the summer of 2007, San Francisco MoMA commissioned the Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico to explore the stretch of land that leads south from the city to Silicon Valley, California’s high-tech capital. Working in both color and black-and-white, Basilico made more than 600 images, from which he selected those appearing in this elegantly conceived book. Trained as an architect, Basilico has an unusually cool, astringent eye, and in these photographs the glorious California landscape is usually glimpsed through a tangle of freeways, tract housing, and eerily depopulated corporate “campuses.” A poet-anthropologist of global suburban sprawl, he shows in fascinating detail what can happen when an antiseptic lifestyle is pitted against a lush environment.

"The Best Recent Releases in Photography" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.