Elsa Arrais

With a background in Engineering, her attraction to the visual arts emerged almost imperceptibly and photography gradually became her means of expression and artistic object. Since 2021, she has contributed to the Fotografar Palavras project, where she often searches for the defining elements of meaning in self-portraits. Since 2024 integrates the collective 22photos22photographers and since 2025 integrates the Street Photography Brazil curators team. With a preference for minimalist black and white photography, her visual exploration is guided by local and temporal ephemera, transforming the peculiarity of the details she finds in the streets she wanders through into brief fragments or reflections of memories and personal essences. With presence in national and international exhibitions and magazines, co-author of the books 18>>20 and olhares na ponta da mão, contributes to several projects that combine various artistic expressions with photography.

Photography comes to her as another way of telling stories and materializing poetry, interests she has explored since she was a child and which led her to study Modern Languages ​​and Literature; she is a Portuguese teacher, creator and editor of a magazine and has participated in projects that combine text and image, as well as in photography exhibitions. 

Adopting a black and white style, she seeks images that somehow suspend the unbridled hustle and bustle of the city, capable of transporting, even fleetingly, things and people to a romantic, poetically nostalgic place, removing them from the mechanical reality of their daily lives.