About
I have spent my working life moving between worlds. I have lived and worked as a photographer and digital designer in Rio de Janeiro, New York and Wellington. I have built things from scratch in each of those places, learned different ways of seeing in each of them, and carried all of it with me.
I am Clarissa, an artist and photographer based in Pōneke, Aotearoa.
I came back to photography after eight years of raising my children and giving myself fully to that work. Returning was not a resumption. It was an arrival. I came back knowing things about presence, about time, about what it means to be seen and unseen, that I could not have known before.
My portrait sessions are built on everything I have gathered. The cities. The years. The conversations. The images I have made and the ones I have only imagined. And above all, the women and people in my life whose stories I have had the privilege of accompanying, whose contradictions, courage and quiet poetry have taught me what it means to witness someone truly.
This work is a quiet form of resistance. In a world that moves too fast and asks us to perform constantly, I want to create spaces where people can pause. Where they can arrive at themselves, even briefly, and be seen in their fullness.
Not the version that is always fine. Not the version that is performing.
The version that is complicated and luminous and unfinished and real.
That is what I am here to photograph.
If something in you recognises this, come.
