ABOUT PAULA
When I left Brazil for London in 2015, I was still working as a freelance researcher for Brazilian and North-American Universities, NGOs and charities, such as FrameWork Institute and Harvard University. While enjoying the freedom of the freelancer life, which allowed me to move to London and fall in love with the city (more specifically in the city!), I felt less enthusiastic about not having a personal creative outlet and the relatively short reach of the field of academic research I had chosen to do.
Feeling confident about the British economy at that time, I decided I wouldn't postpone my dream to work in a creative job any longer. To train as a photographer, I experimented with different areas of photography - interiors, products, families, children - but portrait and documentary photography were always where I wanted to be as they allowed me to bring a visual dimension to the social-inspired questions I've carried with me since the start of my career as a social anthropologist.
My personal photography projects are a direct reflexion of my experience as a female raised in Brazil. After living in the UK for four years, it is even more evident how deeply I have been affected by the conflicts bred by race and gender inequality in Brazil, which is not only the worst country in South America for gender equality, but also one of the most unequal countries in the world.
Profoundly committed to photographing diversity - race, culture, religion, and gender - I combine a documentary approach with portraiture, and photograph sensitive or social-inspired subjects using colour and light as a way to convey a more complex range of feelings, from confidence, freedom and beauty to solitude, fear and abandon.
More importantly, my documentary and portraiture photographs aim to start a conversation about non-dominant and under-represented gender, cultural and race experiences.
