No_Code, a project conceived by the Italian luxury group Tod’s which blends emerging technology with Italian craftsmanship, presents the book “Silicon Valley. No_Code Life”, published by Rizzoli International. A road trip in Silicon Valley as seen by the Iranian-American photographer Ramak Fazel.
With his analogue Rolleiflex around his neck, Fazel takes us on an anthropological investigation that uses the medium of photography to explore one of the most protected places in the world.
Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Stanford University, Woodside, SLAC Accelerator, NASA Research Center, Google, Mountain View, Cupertino, Apple, Orinda, Hacker Dojo, Creekside, San Jose, Half Moon Bay, Mavericks and San Francisco, these are the stages of a path that intends to represent real life in the famous Valley, going beyond what we are constantly told by the media. What’s behind the official images of the big tech companies? How do the inhabitants of this California strip of land under San Francisco live? Where they live? What houses do they have? In which restaurants do they eat? What cars do they drive? How do they have fun?
Silicon Valley is a “no place”. There are no road signs, no border lines that delimit it .. therefore, from a purely geographical perspective, Silicon Valley does not exist. The expression “Silicon Valley” was first used by journalist Don Hoefler in a 1971 article written for the weekly Electronic News.
The 128 images of the visual essay, taken at the end of 2019, exactly a few weeks before the pandemic changed the world, are intended to examine daily life in the Valley, thus offering a useful tool to reconsider the collision between the Californian counterculture of the 1960s. and Seventies and the digital atomization that followed.