Car Culture

Shipping end of February
Car Culture’s immersive design is comprised of 24 full-bleed spreads and an opening essay by Dawoud Bey.
Skylark books

Car Culture, Chicago-based artist Jonathan Castillo’s first monograph, is a typological study of drivers and their cars. Utilizing two vehicles rigged with camera and radio-controlled flash lighting equipment, Castillo photographs unsuspecting commuters situated in the vehicular designed landscape of his hometown of Los Angeles, with a distinctly Hollywood style. The resulting artificially lit photographs depict subjects through their windshields while they wait in traffic lost in thought. Car, driver, and street merge into a project about individual drivers with their cars and a collective portrait of the Los Angeles landscape.

Jonathan Michael Castillo is a visual artist, photographer, and educator based in Chicago. He was the 2019-2021 recipient of the Diane Dammeyer Fellowship in Photographic Arts and Social Issues. Jonathan was included in the 2021 Hyde Park Art Center's Ground FloorBiennial in Chicago and was a finalist for the WMA Commission in Hong Kong. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Wired, The Chicago Tribune, CBS: Los Angeles, and Brazil's G1 Globo. He has appeared on the radio to discuss his photography on the BBC's“World Update” and local Los Angeles public radio programs KPCC and KCRW. Jonathan was recently commissioned to create a large-scale permanent installation of his work at O'Hara International Airport as part of the new Terminal 5 expansion project. Exhibitions include those at the Art Institute Chicago, Photo LA 2020, the Center for CreativePhotography, Aperture Gallery, House of Lucie, Filter Photo Gallery, Ralph Arnold Gallery, and the California Museum of Art Thousand Oaks. Samuel Maenhoudt Gallery in Belgium represents Jonathan. His education includes a BFA from California State University LongBeach and MFA from Columbia College Chicago.