Roberto Badin, Capturing Emptiness Among the Crowds

From the perspective and through the lens of Roberto Badin, unexpected spaces, like the operating theatre of a hospital, come to life. The Brazilian photographer highlights the lines and geometry of the environment, making it the focus of his architecturally inspired images taken in Japanese megacities. ‘I don’t seek to show something accurate, but rather to get a feeling of the place being photographed. I am driven more by emotion than by reason’, the photographer explains.

Roberto Badin conveys his vision of Japan, a place he has admired like a ‘distant planet’ since his childhood in Brazil in the 1970s. He first visited the country in 2016 before returning in 2018 following a commission from independent publisher Benjamin Blanck. Together, they decided to gather the photographer’s images in a first book entitled Inside Japan, which has been translated into Japanese.

A book and an exhibition

On the rare occasions that people appear in his photographs, they are captured from afar, and are present only as a reminder of the scale of the composition, such as a policeman on the beat at the foot of an imposing curved orange wall.

‘I didn’t want to go to Japan like some kind of image thief to then return and exhibit them in the West’, Roberto Badin explains. His photographs, sometimes marked by their vibrant colours, were exhibited from 23 January until 3 March 2019 at the Hôtel Jules et Jim in Paris.