Encontro (Encounter) - Chão de Histórias
Encontro brings together ancestral portraits of my family and the dry, sandy clay of the sertão region in Brazil. It is both a synthesis of origin and an affirmation of its central premise: we are one with the land that holds our history, the ground from which we rise, and to which we return.
Awards
World Photo Annual
2025Bronze
Conceptual
Professional
Encontro (Encounter) - Chão de Histórias
Encontro brings together ancestral portraits of my family and the dry, sandy clay of the sertão region in Brazil. It is both a synthesis of origin and an affirmation of its central premise: we are one with the land that holds our history, the ground from which we rise, and to which we return.
About Artist
Ana Leal
Ana Leal is a visual artist born in Northeast Brazil and based in São Paulo. Her practice explores impermanence, silence, and memory through records of everyday life, nature, and personal narratives. Working with photography, video, and techniques such as collage, monotype, and embroidery, she creates quiet, evocative images that embrace delicacy as a form of resistance. Her works move between the documentary and the poetic, weaving traces of time—wilted flowers, aged paper, broken glass, archival images—into compositions that reveal the expressive potential of fragility and the beauty of the ephemeral. Leal is a Gold Award winner at the 2020 TIFA and the 15th Julia Margaret Cameron Award. She holds an MFA from MIU (2018), has works in the collection of the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, and serves as content editor for South America at the international platform Lenscratch.
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