Photographer Ana Leal is an Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘Menos Pausa’. To see Ana ‘s body of work, click on any photograph.

Menos Pausa (2019– )

Menos Pausa (Less Pause) is an ongoing body of work that reflects on the female body as a living archive of time. Created over the years surrounding menopause, the project moves beyond the biological event itself to consider transformation as a continuous condition—physical, emotional, and symbolic. Rather than documenting the body, these images seek to inhabit it. Layers, fragments, gestures and organic elements become visual metaphors for memory, vulnerability and resilience. The work embraces ambiguity, allowing absence, silence and impermanence to occupy the same space as beauty and strength. Growing older has often been framed through loss or invisibility. Menos Pausa proposes another perspective: transformation not as decline, but as an expansion of experience. It asks what becomes visible when women begin to inhabit their own bodies outside expectations of youth and permanence.

By weaving together photography, experimental processes and tactile interventions, the series invites viewers to reconsider the marks that time leaves behind—not as something to conceal, but as traces of a life continuously being rewritten.

Ana Leal is a Brazilian visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice combines photography, video, collage and mixed media to investigate memory, impermanence and the relationship between body and territory. Her work explores intimate narratives that connect personal experience with broader social and cultural questions. Her projects have been exhibited internationally and recognized through awards including the Sony World Photography Awards, the Julia Margaret Cameron Award and the Tokyo International Foto Awards. In 2026 she presents the solo exhibition Chão de Histórias at the Museum of Image and Sound (MIS), São Paulo.

All images and text © Ana Leal