Cuerpo Vestido, Alma Desnuda

Cuerpo Vestido, Alma Desnuda (Clothed Body, Naked Soul) is a fine art and documentary photography series exploring how cultural constructions of female purity, morality, and restraint shape women's lives across generations. Rooted in Latin American cultural traditions and symbolism, the project unfolds through four archetypes -La Quinceañera, La Novia, La Doña, La Abuela- examining the body as a site of inheritance, expectation, and resistance.

Working between staged and symbolic imagery, the series examines how garments, gestures, and constructed spaces become carriers of cultural memory. Objects traditionally associated with virtue — veils, lace, religious iconography — are recontextualised to question the narratives they uphold and the roles they assign.

A Victorian bridal dress, found in a charity shop in London, becomes a central element of the work. Its origin and reason for donation remain unknown, yet it bears the weight of a historical ideal of purity and femininity shaped during the Victorian era, when modesty, morality, and social conduct were strictly regulated.

Reintroduced within a contemporary context, the dress becomes a vessel through which inherited expectations are both embodied and quietly unsettled. Worn across the four archetypes, the dress becomes a recurring form through which notions of purity are reiterated, displaced, and reimagined.

Through this layering of personal and cultural references, the project reflects on how notions of purity continue to inform the construction of female identity, while opening space for reinterpretation, agency, and resistance within contemporary fine art photography and documentary portraiture.