Everything Sticky, Everything Pink

Bruna Reis was eighteen when she made this, already studying art history at one of Brazil’s top universities and placing work in Italian Vogue, Nakid Magazine, and Sticks & Stones. Two years of shooting and the eye is already specific and committed—which is either a gift or the result of being unusually clear about what you want from images.

What she wanted, working with art director Juliana Rodrigues, was Plastic Orgastic: a shoot starring Instagram model Bruna Leal, surrounded by balloons, champagne, candles, and what appears to be a glistening pink substance of ambiguous but suggestive origin. The whole thing runs hot with a deliberately excessive femininity—not parody, not irony, just the real thing turned up past the point where you can look away without noticing you’re trying.

There’s a video too. Leal moves through the pink excess with the ease of someone generating it rather than being decorated by it, and that’s most of the erotic charge, honestly. A lot of photographers would frame something like this as commentary. Reis just lets it be what it is: a beautiful woman, too many balloons, something glistening, and a camera that knows when to stay out of the way. Brazil keeps producing photographers who understand that instinctively.