When I was a child, I would go to my grandmother’s house, and I loved looking through her old pictures. I would look at her in her youth through them, always with a cigarette in her hand... My grandparents, legend has it, were very much in love, and I could see that in those images. Especially because, back then, photography had this very documentary quality. Everything felt real and truthful. You could see the sadness, the happiness, in someone’s eyes. I like to think that, in some way, my work reminds me of those old images in my grandmother’s house, where I could see, in someone’s eyes, what they had felt.
I see myself as an artist, and so I am not looking for clients who simply want a service, but for people who connect with a way of thinking: To exist is necessary. And it is necessary to exist fully, with everything that you are. I am pro-LGBTQ+. I am also an immigrant, and I deeply relate to the experience of being in a foreign land, trying to connect and find my place. There are so many standards of beauty. So many stigmas about how a woman should be, how a man should be. I let go of all of them. As Rubem Alves said: “I want to decolorize myself so I can color myself again.” So I’m not looking for ideals or stereotypical ideas of beauty. I look for ways of expressing a kind of beauty that goes beyond them. That’s why Van Gogh’s words, “Finding things beautiful as much as you can,” stay with me. Because that is what I am looking for: finding beauty. Beauty that exists far beyond standards and stigmas, and that, from my perspective, can be found in authenticity, in the freedom to exist exactly as we are.
