Anabel Morey: The Silent Manifestos of Urban Identity

At 56 years old, Venezuelan photographer Anabel Morey, based in São Paulo, builds a body of work that moves between memory, territory, and identity. With a trajectory that began in 2012 in Venezuela, where she worked with gastronomy and architecture, and later deepened in Spain, she developed a photographic approach that transforms the camera into an instrument for translating atmospheres and understanding the world—and herself.

Her work “Identity,” a finalist in the Photo Essay category of the FotoDoc Photo Contest 2025, is a visual investigation into the codes of self-expression in the metropolis of São Paulo. Carried out over the five years she has lived in the city, the work deciphers how aesthetic choices—from clothes to tattoos, from adornments to hairstyles—function as silent manifestos of identity. Through a foreign gaze that paradoxically recognizes itself in the other, Morey captures stories of resistance, authenticity, and self-definition that pulse in the streets of São Paulo, revealing how appearance becomes a territory of freedom and individual expression in a city marked by diversity and contradiction.

Discover more about this visual research and the photographer’s future projects in the following interview.

Imagem do Ensaio Identidade, de Anabel Morey, finalista do Prêmio Portfólio FotoDoc 2025

How old are you? Where do you currently live and work?

I am 56 years old. I live in São Paulo, a city that is now my home and also my territory of discovery.

Tell us about your journey in photography. When did you start photographing and why? What role does photography play in your life?

Photography entered my life in 2012, in Venezuela, where I began my training and worked with images of gastronomy and architecture. Later, in Spain, I immersed myself in more intimate work, where identity and memory became guiding threads.

For me, photographing is an act of translation: I translate places, atmospheres, and people into images that help me understand the world and myself. Although I have lived in Brazil for many years, I always carry a subtle feeling of being a foreigner—and it is through photography that I find bridges, recognize the other, and, in some way, also recognize myself.

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?

São Paulo welcomed me five years ago, after a long period in Porto Alegre—a city with more restrained rhythms, similar to the Caracas of my childhood. In contrast, São Paulo pulsates with diversity, contradiction, and freedom.

While photographing on the streets, I noticed that the way people dress, get tattoos, or adorn their bodies is more than aesthetics: it is a silent manifesto about who they are and how they want to be seen. These visual signals reveal stories of resistance, authenticity, and self-definition.
This investigation into the relationship between appearance and identity dialogues directly with my photographic production, where I seek to understand how the image—chosen and constructed—becomes a territory of expression and freedom.

What projects are you currently working on? What are your near-future plans for photographic production?

I continue to expand my essay on identity, deepening the layers that define who we are beyond the surface.

At the same time, I am developing a project in São Paulo about absence and memory, which proposes a sensitive look at the urban traces left by everyday gestures, in a São Paulo marked by speed, exclusion, and the constant adaptation of bodies to space.