Maria Eugenia Nabuco: The Body as a Territory of Denunciation and Memory

At 78 years old, Maria Eugenia Nabuco builds a photographic trajectory that intertwines poetic sensitivity with political urgency. A psychoanalyst and photographer, she divides her time between Rio de Janeiro and Paris, developing a body of work where the human body emerges as a battlefield and a site of resistance against the violences of the contemporary world. Her practice, which began as an informal record of travels and affections, transformed into a deeply engaged aesthetic investigation, where the image operates as an instrument of social questioning and psychic elaboration.

Her image “License to Kill” a finalist in the Single Image category of the FotoDoc Photo Contest 2025, is a stroke of visual lucidity about institutionalized brutality. Part of a 2019 homonymous series, the work was born from indignation at the extermination of young Black people in Rio’s communities, articulating Rocinha – the largest favela in Latin America – and the multi-artist Retinto Fercar, from Maré, in an experimental narrative that exposes the desensitization of life in the peripheries. More than a denunciation, the work delves into the entrails of a social body marked by exclusion, where physiological and social death intertwine under the logic of power. With a language that tensions the poetic and the political, Nabuco invites the viewer to confront targeted cruelty and the trivialization of the human in territories silenced by the State.

Explore more about this visceral work and the projects that challenge the grammar of the image in the interview that follows.

Imagem do Ensaio At Home, de Maria Eugenia Nabuco, selecionado no Prêmio Portfólio FotoDoc 2025

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

I am 78 years old and I currently live and work in Rio de Janeiro since 2018. I am organizing myself to return to working in Paris in 2026.

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

Initially, I photographed family, friends, and travels through the countries I was getting to know, without a formal aesthetic engagement structured in the field of visual arts. It was gradually, by developing research and study on aesthetics and language in photographic narrative, that in the late 1990s I began to develop an experimental imagery work that has resonated in a poetic vision of the human and culture. My work is always marked by the presence of the body and its appropriation in the encounter with the strangeness of the real. An inevitable conversation with my practice as a psychoanalyst. I always try to maintain this necessary ease between the field of aesthetic experimentation and the circumstances of life.

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?

My finalist work is part of a 2019 series entitled License to Kill. It was born from my unease when confronted with the death rate of young Black people resulting from police actions in the communities of Rio de Janeiro. This work portrays the community of Rocinha, the largest in Latin America, and the young multi-artist ‘Retinto Fercar’ from the Maré community is the one posing. It is an experimental narrative of the social body of Rio, a depository for lives that don’t matter, where cruelty has Black density and an address.

Here, the entrails of Rocinha lay bare the submission of life to the power of death. Horror, the trivialization of the human, are established in territories and political promises in these communities. In this work, I tried to grasp the inevitability of social death and physiological death resulting from social exclusion in this discordant world of political disorder in which we live. The contemporary, as it crosses the language of the senses, is a common source of inevitable anguish, of a grief almost impossible to process, where bodies and more bodies from the social chaos flood our daily lives.

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

Taken by a pulsating restlessness, my work continues to appropriate the organic corporeal weave of the image, in the study of the ‘body of the image’ and its poetic and grammatological construction. I am currently producing my third photobook, Pulsations, in partnership with Piscina Pública, which will handle its editing.