Real Estate Opportunities continues Japanese photographer Takashi Homma’s homage series to the influential American artist Ed Ruscha, following similar photobooks by Homma such as Every Building on the Ginza Street, Royal Road Test, Babycakes, and Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations.
Ruscha’s original Real Estate Opportunities series was published in 1970 and featured photographs of empty building lots for sale in Los Angeles. For his tribute, Homma (together with series collaborators Yoshihisa Tanaka and Yusuke Nakajima) photographed empty lots in and around Tokyo. Its design and size carefully replicating Ruscha’s original, Homma’s photobook possesses a charm of its own as it captures the strange optimism and sense of possibility of these negative spaces within Tokyo’s dense architectural sprawl.
