Riccardo Banfi

Sunshine Noir2017-2020

Series of 125 photographs
inkjet prints, b/w & color
variable dimensions

video
color, sound, 4’15”
soundtrack: Death in Plains, Fortezza Europa (2018)

“Sunshine Noir summarizes and integrates the numerous antipodes which constitute the physical and emotional topography of Los Angeles, California. A city of angels, LA is at once a diabolical lair, its ultramarine sky and unabating sunshine blighted by the congestive traffic, the glamour of its mansions overshadowed by the gloom of homelessness and the spindliness of its palm trees vying with the sweep of the beaches and the desert floor.
In more than one hundred photographs Riccardo Banfi highlights these unrelenting contrasts, making for a chequered narrative about a city of surface, of lonesome smiles and boundless freeways, of urban spread and personal constringency. His photographic essay is both a mosaic of fragments and a hymn to diversity and individual initiative, telling us that the single, common denominator of this fabulous city lies in its very disparateness and in the endlessness of its supermarkets, parking-lots and suburban housing sprawling relentlessly across mountain and valley, coast and plain”.

Excerpt from Nicoletta Misler and John E. Bowlt, “Shifting Sands”, in Sunshine Noir (2020)

° Sunshine Noir photo book: to make a purchase, send an email to riccardo.bnf@gmail.com, or visit Bildband (Berlin), Camera (Turin), Bruno (Venice), COLLI (Rome)

° Watch Sunshine Noir (the video) here