At 24 years old, Brazilian photographer Laís Mazzucco from Santa Catarina creates work where the image acts as a powerful instrument of subjective investigation and social critique. A Literature student and art photographer, her trajectory is marked by a deep search for self-portraiture and references ranging from the iconic Francesca Woodman to philosophy and literature, creating a dense and poetically introspective visual universe.
Her essay “Studies on Delirium“, a finalist in the Photo Essay category of the FotoDoc Photo Contest 2025, is a debut work that consumed three years of development. In it, Laís dives into the constructions of female identity, dialoguing with gender theories and the history of psychiatry, which historically associated “madness” with the realm of women. Through dreamlike images, veils, and unidentified faces, the series deconstructs the idea of an “ideal woman” and exposes, with sensitivity and rawness, the experience of delirium from both a personal and collective perspective.
How old are you? Where do you currently live and work?
I am 24 years old, I’m from the countryside of Santa Catarina, Orleans, and I live in Florianópolis. I am an art photographer and a Portuguese Literature student at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC).
Tell us about your journey in photography. When did you start photographing and why? What role does photography play in your life?
My journey begins at seven years old, when I took my family’s hidden soap dish camera and took a self-portrait of myself crying; that was my first image. Later, I started consuming a lot of Francesca Woodman’s photography during the pandemic and then tried to reproduce it, partly due to my childhood interest in self-portraiture, and because of Woodman’s themes, which were quite dark, nebulous, funereal, and had a strong connection to the period of social isolation.
I started out of a subjective need, then I spent some time away from images, reading, gathering references from cinema, literature, and the visual arts in general. When I returned, I was overflowing, and it became almost an obsession. Photography brings me a lot of awareness; I feel I photograph the unconscious, like psychoanalytic work. It plays a role of both subjective and objective need—subjective because I photograph the unconscious, and objective to contemplate the image afterward, since it illuminates what was captured, making me live better.
Tell us about your finalist work for the FotoDoc Photo Contest 2025. When and where was it created? What is its concept? How does it fit into your photographic practice?
This exhibition is being mounted for the third time; the first was at UFSC, the second at the Integrated Culture Center in Florianópolis, and now at the Venere Gallery, also in Florianópolis. It is my first solo exhibition, my debut essay, so I have been working on it for three years before bringing it to the public. I have been thinking about identity—my own as a woman, as an artist—and then socially. I was influenced by Judith Butler and tried to blend it with popular culture, with the ideal woman, but she appears in the images with an unidentified face, since she doesn’t exist; in the images where she appears, there are veils, grain, or she is not very clear.
I sought to expose delirium, which arises from studies on hysteria (which etymologically means uterus). Madness has been associated with women in the history of psychiatry, so I wanted to dialogue this factor with my personal experiences, bringing it to a more social scope.
What projects are you currently working on? What are your near-future plans for photographic production?
The continuation of this work is already ready but has not been made public yet. It is called Essay on the Real, also inspired by identity; it is a transition. The images are lighter and were inspired by Machado de Assis’s short story The Mirror, and also The Real and Its Double by Clément Rosset. I aim to mix the language of words in my future works, influenced by literature, with written overlays that dialogue with the images, thinking about art in postmodernity through Walter Benjamin and Rancière.
