Sandra Cattaneo Adorno is a street photographer. She was born in 1953 in Rio de Janeiro. She started photographing in 2013, at the age of 60. Her daughter Gwen had invited her to a workshop with Alex and Rebecca Webb as a gift for her 60th birthday.
Street photography is her way of questioning reality and representation. She also experiments with how her work is shown. She uses new inks and materials and combines still images with projection and sound. In 2021 she won the Jurors' Pick in the LensCulture Street Photography Awards.
Radius Books has published four of her books: The Other Half of the Sky (2019), Águas de Ouro (2020), Scarti di Tempo (2022) and Ten Years (2024). She made Scarti di Tempo after the Covid-19 pandemic began in March 2020. For it she collaged images from her archive, and the Magnum photographer Gueorgui Pinkhassov wrote the introduction. Ten Years is an accordion-fold book with 176 pages, printed in gold metallic ink on black paper.
In 2022 she had solo shows at Palazzo Mora in Venice and at the Brazilian Consulate in New York. Photographer Gulnara Lyabib Samoilova curated both. Ten Years was shown at Palazzo Bembo in Venice in 2024. In 2026 she returned to Palazzo Bembo with Fragments of Light, on view from May 9 to November 22. It has 13 main works printed in silver metallic ink on dark blue paper and a video projection of 55 images. It also includes her first three-dimensional work, a photomosaic made from a single image of the Santa Monica pier.
