Studio Visits

I visit Fabio Okamoto at his place in Brooklin. After a rather rough bus ride, I arrive and we start chatting about living in São Paulo and the cultural diversity between its population. Fabio has an education from the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the Universidade de São Paulo. During the week, he works as graphic designer. He has set up his works on the dining table and we start looking at his photographs, which he neatly keeps in cardboard cases.



Fabio explains that he started working with black and white photography and analogue cameras. He tried to find forms and details in the city that the not so attendant viewer would not even notice. His images of São Paulo from the series Hidden City (2001/2003) were taken from one of the high buildings in the city centre and show the typical skyline of never ending concrete. Due to the multiple exposure Fabio employs in surrealist tradition, there seems to be a motion that opens a view on the city the naked eye cannot see. These photographs reveal the feeling of movement that is so typical for this metropolis. In some of the images, the architecture is covered by a veil, a piece of cloth the wind blows into a certain form, which repeats itself in other parts of Fabio’s work. Then, there is a series of spaces that most paulistanos usually would not know themselves, demolished buildings in the city centre, that Fabio prefers to depict at night when there is less activity and a more interesting lighting to capture.

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