Stephanie Cruz Mendez
(2025) Fotossensível is a personal study on perception, impermanence, and cultural inheritance. Weaving analog photography, cyanotype, and a zine, the project traces quiet thresholds between public and private, sacred and mundane, past and present. The series emerges from the liminal spaces of the city and the objects, patterns, and textures of my maternal grandmother’s home in Rio de Janeiro. It extends into a dark space where I began archiving what could be imprinted into light. Shaped by a diasporic life between Brazil and the United States, the images form a fragmented language in an attempt to document what slips, shifts, or disappears. 

Each time I return, the house is not as I left it. Chairs once familiar sit broken. Photographs fade, curl, or vanish. Objects are passed on, sold, or disappear without notice. With each visit, the memory of the place shifts, not dramatically, but subtly, accumulating over time.

The cyanotypes on view are a selection from those created over the course of this project, using a range of methods including negatives, paper cutouts, and contact prints. Some began as photographs while others were constructed or imprinted directly. I work primarily with cyanotype for its connection to light, time, and transformation. The process feels intimate and unpredictable, more an imprint than a reproduction. These works hold onto symbols and places that feel foundational, each one shaped by hand as much as by image. Together they map a passage through personal and cultural memory, guided by a desire to hold onto what time tries to erase.


Fotossensível zine
First edition of 20 copies 
Risograph printed, 5 x 8 in
July 2025






                 



Select works:

Untitled (Azulejo #1), 2025. Cyanotype on ceramic tile, 8.5 x 8.5 in


Dwenini mmen, 2025. Cyanotype, 8 x 10 in

Mensagem Forjada no Ferro, 2025. Cyanotype, 16 x 20 in
Sankofa #2, 2025. Cyanotype, 11 x 14 in
Untitled (Rosario #2) , 2024. Cyanotype, 8 x 10 in 
Mar de Outras Vidas, 2025. Cyanotype, 16 x 20 in 
Ebb and Flow of Time, 2025. Cyanotype, 16 x 20 in
Untitled (Rede #1), 2024. Cyanotype. 8 x 10 in
Untitled (Pano de mesa #4), 2025. Cyanotype. 11 x 14 in
Vista Cotidiana (Entre Redes), 2025. Cyanotype, 16 x 20 in