“What happens every day and recurs every day, the banal, the everyday, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the usual, how do we account for it, how do we question it, how do we describe it?” – Georges Perec
“When you grow up facing the sea, the feeling of the ocean never leaves you. What struck me most when I settled on the Basque Coast was the light and the changes in atmosphere, which are even stronger out of season. That moment when the region empties itself of its seasonal workers and, as with any seaside region, the atmosphere becomes more serene and convivial.
The emotion that emerges is so powerful that I felt the need to capture it in images.
I prefer the banality of everyday life to journalistic reporting of an imposed situation. The surreal atmosphere of the cities emptied of their inhabitants during the first confinement in 2020 created a false impression that prevented me from continuing to photograph. It would have been another approach, another subject even. So I decided to wait for life to get back to normal before the project resurfaced.
Unlike a trip, where we arrive in a place with a blank stare, surveying the streets around your home becomes a challenge. Confronted daily with the same details and ambiences, everything could seem almost too banal to catch the eye. It’s precisely this challenge that appealed to me: the simplicity of things, the fascinating aesthetics of the ordinary everyday.
My exploration took place solely on foot, over a set period of time, and I noticed that I never went beyond a 4km* radius around my home.
This route became a journey with imaginary boundaries, giving free rein to intuition and chance as I wandered.
Rather than the exercise of bearing witness, my intention was to tame a space in such a way as to extract its identity; a kind of cartography in which light and emotion were my only guides.
Without realizing it, I polarized my eternal sources of inspiration: architecture, cinema and literature; I’m thinking in particular of what Georges Perec called “the infra-ordinary”.
Discovering certain attitudes of the characters inside the images became a daily pleasure when returning from each day’s shooting.
AFTER SUMMER is a project whose aim is not to show emptiness, but rather what’s around and inside. It’s about observing a fragment of reality as I see it and feel it, without the ambition of telling a story other than the one everyone can make up for themselves by looking at the photos.
What we really see and discover over time, simply by observing more closely.” – Roberto Badin
Roberto Badin
Born in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Roberto Badin moved to France in the late 1980s. A still-life photographer, he has collaborated with numerous international magazines and signed prestigious campaigns in the luxury and fashion worlds. He was invited to take part in the “Lady Dior As Seen By” project, which toured the world’s major capitals. In 2017, his personal work was exhibited at Selfridges in London. His first book, Inside Japan, published in 2018 by Éditions Benjamin Blanck, has been the subject of several photographic exhibitions, including the prestigious Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, the Musée des Arts Asiatiques in Nice and at L’ANGLE gallery in Hendaye, in 2020.
The “Après l’été” series will be published in 2023 by Éditions 37.2.
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