A collection of 41 ink renderings with artistʼs description and a plate location key.

For Carmelo Monti, a vacation in Japan triggered a yearning to return, both physically and metaphorically through his boundless imagination. A second trip reinforced that desire. With a stockpile of hundreds of photos taken in 2004 and 2007, he could visually revisit temples, shrines, bridges, and cities, but in his mindʼs-eye, his memories recreated their three-dimensional space.

Already skilled in drawing with pen and ink, he developed a technique for combining photographic images taken from different angles, so that overlaps and hidden layers merged into one perspective. Visions of places came to him over a period of about fifteen years, seemingly in random order, without a clear connection to sequence, rhyme, or reason.

Following retirement from his 40-plus year career in architecture, his hand returned to this endeavor with more frequency. By Autumn 2022, he had accumulated more than forty drawings, so friends and family encouraged him to publish them.