Dog Years

New York–based photographer Naho Kubota has been documenting disappearing auto repair shops scattered across New York City since 2006, with particular focus on the period from 2019 to 2024. These photographs are primarily taken after business hours and are devoid of human presence. While attention is paid to the specific arrangements formed by car parts, the gaze is directed even more strongly toward the spaces of the workshops themselves.

Viewed as a spatial typology, body shops—especially the paint booths to which Kubota appears particularly drawn—can be understood as an extreme form of the artist’s studio. In these spaces, architecture seems almost to recede into the background, relinquishing all prominence to the process of making itself.

By excluding any trace of human presence and illuminating the “stage sets” of neatly arranged car parts and paint booths, Kubota’s photographs quietly reveal the memories of labor carried out there, along with the layered traces of time that have accumulated within these spaces.