Nathalie Mendonça is a Brazilian photographer based in Rio de Janeiro, and her images have that rare quality that makes you slow down without being asked. She works primarily with Polaroid and analogue processes, but what matters isn’t the gear. It’s the way she uses the instant format as a kind of emotional measurement: not to document life, but to touch it. Her practice moves through memory and intimacy with a calm confidence, often through self-portraits and small details that feel private without being closed-off. The photographs don’t perform. They confess, quietly.
I met Nathalie in Paris during ImageNation last November. I’d already been following her work, but meeting her in person did something that scrolling never can. Our prints were facing each other, separated by a couple of meters, and that typical gallery distance we all pretend is neutral. It wasn’t. I couldn’t just nod from afar. I walked over, introduced myself, and told her what I genuinely felt: her images were some of the most sensitive, precise photographs I’d seen in a long time. Not “pretty.” Not “dreamy.” Precise, in the way a memory can be precise when it hits the right nerve.
There’s a nostalgic aesthetic in her work, yes, but it doesn’t feel like styling. It feels like an atmosphere. Like the aftertaste of a scene you can’t fully explain, only remember. Her photographs carry a cinematic tension, not in the sense of drama, but in the sense of pacing. She knows when to hold back. She knows when the light should speak, and when it should whisper. You can feel her trust in softness, not as an effect, but as a decision. A refusal to harden emotion into something more “impressive” for the viewer.
Her self-portraits, especially, don’t read as self-display. They read as self-presence. They suggest a person trying to be honest with their own reflection, and using the instant image as a partner in that honesty. Polaroid is unforgiving in its own way, and also merciful. It records what it records, but it also gives you accidents, blooming edges, gentle shifts, and a little fog where certainty would normally sit. Nathalie leans into that. Imperfection isn’t a flaw in her practice; it’s part of the vocabulary. The softness, the subtle blur, the faded tones, the fragile skin of the image itself all become evidence of a feeling that doesn’t want to be pinned down.
What we love most is how her work finds emotion in the everyday without turning it into a slogan. She photographs fragments, not because she has nothing bigger to say, but because fragments are often the most truthful form of memory. A hand, a shadow, a glance that might be her own or someone else’s, a corner of a room that still holds yesterday’s air. These details don’t ask for interpretation. They invite recognition. And that’s where her cultural influences live too, not in obvious symbols, but in the rhythm of the images, in their heat, in their tenderness, in their sense of lived time.
Nathalie is currently developing a body of work that expands her fine-art practice, and you can already feel that expansion happening from inside the frame. There’s an artist here who isn’t rushing to explain herself, because she doesn’t need to. She’s building a world where intimacy is not a theme, but a method. A way of looking, a way of staying close.
We’re genuinely happy to share Nathalie’s work with our community, because it reminds us of something simple and difficult at the same time: instant photography isn’t only about speed. Sometimes it’s about care. About choosing softness as a form of strength. About making images that don’t shout for attention, yet somehow remain with you long after you’ve looked away.