Dog Years

Naho Kubota, a photographer based in New York, has been documenting the yellow cab repair shops scattered across the city since 2006, with particularly focused work between 2019 and 2024. Each time one of those familiar yellow bodies gets dented, it returns to a dedicated paint booth and is sprayed yellow once again — a quiet, repetitive labor of keeping a city symbol the right shade of yellow. Yet over the years, the layers of overspray slowly build up on the walls and floors of the booths, and without anyone intending it, a strange, almost dreamlike space takes shape inside them.

In recent years, the rise of ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft has steadily thinned the yellow cab fleet, and the repair shops that have long sustained it are disappearing one by one. This book is, in part, an archive of those disappearing places. Most of what appears in these images is already half-gone in the moment it’s photographed. Something that no longer quite exists, lingering on the premises as a kind of presence — what Jacques Derrida called hauntology — drifts quietly through these pictures.

The photographs are mostly taken after closing hours, and no one is in the frame. Kubota, who works primarily as an architectural photographer, sees the space as a whole and, at the same time, lets her gaze drift unexpectedly into close-up: the chance arrangements of car parts, a corner of a paint booth. Within a single image, the architect’s wide view and the obsessive’s close attention coexist in a curious balance. Considered as a typology of space, the paint booths Kubota has been so drawn to could perhaps be read as an extreme form of the artist’s studio. Architecture recedes almost entirely into the background, and all the presence of the room is given over to the act of making — the repetition of painting yellow, again and again.

By withholding the human figure and turning her light gently onto the orderly rows of car parts and the paint booths — these “stage sets” — Kubota’s photographs quietly bring out the memory of the labor once carried out there, and the layered traces of time accumulated within the space.