Jonathan Castillo’s photographs of Angelenos sitting in their cars move nimbly along a knife’s edge between the familiar and the surreal. In a country where people spend an average of an hour a day inside an automobile, the scenes that Castillo captures—drivers sitting at red lights, enclosed by steel and glass, thinking car thoughts—are as quotidian as it gets. Yet these images feel novel, even a little eerie. From the outside, cars are massive hunks of metal on wheels. On the inside, though, they feel softer, like sanctuaries: sealed spaces for contemplation and decompression. Castillo’s photos somehow evoke both the exterior and interior simultaneously. When you see them, an itch starts in the back of your brain. Eventually, you realize that the itch is a question: How were these images made?

In the summer of 2008, Castillo, a native of Southern California, took a photography class at ArtCenter College of Design, in Pasadena. His professor introduced him to Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s famous photographs of pedestrians in Times Square. They were candid street shots with a twist: diCorcia lit his pictures with strobe lights, from above, infusing them with the compositional drama and intensity of a staged portrait. Castillo was so smitten with the project that he set about re-creating it on the campus of Moorpark College, where he was enrolled full time. But he was never satisfied with the results. “I needed to do something to make it my own,” he told me recently. “I started thinking, No one walks in L.A., so why am I photographing pedestrians?”