Italian Photographer Matteo Carella Captures Urban Tokyo In Noir And Neon

Matteo Carella aka adjacent.future is a self-taught photographer from Torre Annunziata (a town near Naples, Italy) currently based in Milan. He loves capturing Tokyo pictures both in daylight and nightlight scene.

More: Matteo Carella, Instagram h/t: boredpanda

“I’ve travelled a lot in my life, but visiting Asia is a completely different story. I went there in 2015 for the first time, when I visited Tokyo. It was a mind-blowing experience for me, and when I came back it felt like I had been living a long, beautiful dream”.

The name of his project adjacent.future is a tribute to Stuart A. Kauffman and his book “At Home in the Universe”, where the concept of “adjacent possible” was first introduced: a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

“At beginning I was not even interested in photography. I just took random shots as travel memories, but trip after trip (I try to visit Japan at least once a year) I started accumulating tons of picture I wanted to use, to give life to. Influenced by movies like Lost In Translation, Blade Runner, In The Mood For Love, or anime like Your Name and Evangelion, which are permeated with vaporwave, cyberpunk, scifi and outrun aesthetic, I started playing around with Lightroom app, editing my pictures and opening an Instagram channel. One year after I started this project, my page had reached around 10K followers”.

“I like to experiment a lot with different styles and tones, and the city of Tokyo is a great playground for that. It’s easy to get lost in Shinjuku nightlights or wander around Shibuya after midnight. But I’m equally fascinated by the crisp and clear japanese mornings, which also have a unique and special taste. Songs like Vapour Trail or When The Sun Hits inevitably shape how I see and photograph these Japanese scenes”.

“Just like my native town (where I’ve not been living for 10 years), Tokyo is a source of nostalgia for me. I want to keep taking pictures to communicate my feelings and hopefully inspire other people to visit Japan. But emotions are complex and can only be articulated through abstraction, this requires a continuous experimentation. I also believe that feelings cannot be separated from places we love and only when we share feelings and emotions as human beings we can define ourselves connected with others for real”.