What Casagrande Does with a Camera and a Woman Who Knows She’s Being Watched

The third issue of Polanski Magazine arrived with Mariana Braga on the cover and Alessandro Casagrande behind the camera—five hundred copies, already gone. The photographs are bright and saturated, the kind of work that gives you something to keep looking at without being entirely sure why.

Casagrande has a specific talent: he makes women look like they’re genuinely enjoying being seen, which is harder than it sounds. A lot of editorial photography ends up making its subjects look bored or performing the opposite of bored. His images don’t have that problem. Braga in these shots looks like she arrived with her own agenda and let him document what happened. The camera feels invited rather than imposed.