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“It is all a little bit conscious and a little bit unconscious,” explains photographer Esther Varella, 27, about the juxtaposition between love and sickness, which synthesizes her work. This young Brazilian prodigy now resides in São Paulo, Brazil, after having lived nine years between New York and Los Angeles. She has been photographing since she was a child, and professionally for seven years. Her images of empty spaces embody solitude with delicacy in a very feminine manner. A lot of it is due to her lighting, pale and natural, evoking the works of photographers Elisa Sighicelli (Italy) and Luisa Lambri (Brazil). |
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Esther Varella – Eduarda de Souza
“It is all a little bit conscious and a little bit unconscious,” explains photographer Esther Varella, 27, about the juxtaposition between love and sickness, which synthesizes her work. This young Brazilian prodigy now resides in São Paulo, Brazil, after having lived nine years between New York and Los Angeles. She has been photographing since she was a child, and professionally for seven years. Her images of empty spaces embody solitude with delicacy in a very feminine manner. A lot of it is due to her lighting, pale and natural, evoking the works of photographers Elisa Sighicelli (Italy) and Luisa Lambri (Brazil).
Esther has been exercising herself as an artist by photographing institutional places such as schools and hospitals. “It started in Los Angeles and I guess the city brought it out,” she claims. “It is that sensation of feeling alone while surrounded by people,” she explains about the choice of photographing such venues. These remain unnamed, as some were photographed without permission. “I like the fact that they are not related to any name or time.”
“My school pictures just relate to those first two or three days in a new school really. We all feel a little bit lost and the coldness coming from an institutional place does not help at all.” Like all kids, this promising artist was just trying to fit in. “What inspires me is the ability to say what I think.” The simplicity of her work makes it most appealing, art is our everyday life. Austrian photographer Ernst Hass famously said: “If the beautiful were not in us, who would ever recognize it?”
Amongst her favorite photographers are Nan Goldin, William Eggleston, Jeff Wall, Philip-Lorca di Corcia, Wolfgang Tillmans, Thomas Demand, Uta Barth, Katharina Bosse, Corrine Day and Larry Sultan. “I have tried to reference other photographers in my own work, but that did not work out. It became reality when I started to express my own feelings.” Photo time is a lonely one for Esther, who walks around cities with her Mamiya RZ camera. Having recently completed one year in Brazil, Esther has photographed a university that specializes in architecture, as well as a hospital.
While living in New York, she worked as a fashion photographer for publications such as Nylon and Dazed & Confused, both of which promote primarily cutting-edge fashion and art. “Amongst all the chaos in our lives, beauty is something that always lets us transcend the mundane aspects and glimpse the sublime for a few seconds, and when I squint my eyes it lasts a little longer.” Based in Brazil, she still works as a fashion photographer for international publications as well as for major Brazilian prints such as Folha de São Paulo magazine, which is part of Brazil’s largest newspaper.
What can be seen in her fashion photographs, and is still to be seen in her other works, is her astute ability to shoot movement. “I am interested in ballerinas; not when they are dancing but when they are studying new movements, stretching or just sitting focused…they seem so disciplined.”
Esther will now embark on photographing elderly people in São Paulo. Her near future promises a project shot inside mental institutions. “I’ve always been fascinated by severe mental disorders in which thoughts and emotions are so impaired that contact with external reality is lost.” She has not yet decided whether these places will be shot alone or with the people who belong in them. Does she feel lonely? “Rarely, almost never. Loneliness is a state of mind, I am very comfortable in my own skin.” Maybe that is why she is not afraid of inviting the viewer to fill her empty spaces with imagination.
