CREATIVE DIRECTION & PHOTOGRAPHY

A deeply personal project born from grief. Created in memory of Inês, a brilliant photographer and beloved friend, the work transforms private sorrow into shared tenderness.

It's a wish: that she found the dawn light that soothes the heart, wherever she is.

This is a mapped emotional arc through mental health crisis and recovery. Each image documents a distinct phase: numbness and dissociation at the bottom, disorientation, fragility of receiving support, spiraling thoughts, until finally facing pain head-on. Only by letting sadness fully occupy the body does movement become possible.

Fashion and light function as tools to externalize interior collapse and reconstruction. Early images use stillness and closed gestures; midway images fracture through movement and disorientation; final images settle into grounded presence, not as resolution, but the capacity to stand within difficulty.

The sequence culminates in nudity. Stripped of all styling and narrative framing, the body becomes statement itself. This act of undressing is permission: to simply exist, without performance, without protection. Vulnerability is both endpoint and beginning.

Dawn light it's the courage to face what's real and move from that honesty.

Photography & Creative Direction / Alessandra Rizzi Production & Art Direction / Ana Margarida Matos Makeup / Diogo Ribeiro Styling / Cândida Pinto & Cristiana Maciel Model / Letícia Santana (Best Models) Cover Story / Mob Magazine