Márcia Simões' (MASIMMO) Cinematic Fine Art Photography

Lisbon-based photographer Márcia Simões, alternatively known as MASIMMO, approaches life with a cinematic sensitivity rooted in curiosity and commits her practice to taking us with her to experience it. With a passion for cinematography, she shares photos that preserve moments in time and simultaneously, imagination.

A blurry, close-up shot shows a hand holding a beige, rotary-dial telephone. The phone's number pad is visible with a grid of black dots. Photograph by Marcia Simoes.

Simões’ photography unfolds in the space between what is seen and what is sensed. Her images don’t attempt to describe the world as it is, nor do they fully abandon it for fantasy. Instead, they hover in her intimate experience between the observed and the felt. Her photographic style of ambient and imprecise moments cast by alluring light, challenges our preconceived expectations of the mundane landscapes that surround us.

Inviting Uncertainty Through Blur, Light, and Ambiguity

At times abstracted and obscured by blurred focus or unexpected light, Simões replaces the objective gaze on candid subjects with the room to imagine. Rather than clarifying her subjects, she creates space for ambiguity.

By simplifying what she chooses to include in each frame, Simões provides us with just enough information to enter. The viewer’s emotional state completes the image, picking up from where she lets us in. Her images that exist just outside of focus, or context, ask us to step outside of observation and participate in the imagined.

A street lamp glows orange in the evening, illuminating a road surrounded by trees. Above, a dark sky is topped with a thin line of white clouds. Photograph by Marcia Simoes.

Softness veils over her cinematic view of her subjects, not just as a stylistic decision, but as a method of inquiry. Her work reflects the curiosity she travels with, about the stories to be told of the subjects she encounters in her day-to-day life. Simões’ photography treats her encounters like remembered experiences rather than records or documentation.

A tall, green cactus stands prominently against a dark blue night sky, illuminated by a bright, full moon. A delicate spiderweb is visible between the cactus arms. Photograph by Marcia Simoes.

Light, Time, and the Cinematic Moment in Fine Art Photography

Often working on the move, Simões captures candid moments shaped by shifting conditions of natural light and time of day. Her photos span a wide spectrum from moonlit scenes to frames bathed in sunlight. In her evening shoots, form is often made legible by silhouette, backlit by a hazy sky, highlighted in elusive detail by streetlights or a fading sunset.

A large, dark rock formation is silhouetted against a blue, misty sky and ocean. The scene is dimly lit, creating a moody and mysterious atmosphere. Photograph by Marcia Simoes.

From a behind the scenes photo (2021) from a film shoot in Portugal, Simões catches a beachrock rising from the wispy sea at dusk, its edges dissolving into the shoreline. The beach is loosely defined by silhouettes, while the horizon of the sea fades nearly seamlessly into the moonlit sky.

Form and distance become an illusion. The shadows patiently wait for the viewer to enter the deep blue landscape and invite our imagination to make sense of the darkened scene. Simões tends to her subject as if it were a story to unfold slowly for the viewer, leaving us to play with ideas of the haze and breeze at the Ericeira beach.

A low-angle shot captures the silhouette of a tree with golden-hued leaves against a deep blue, twilight sky. The branches reach upwards, creating an intricate network of lines and shapes. Photograph by Marcia Simoes.

Embodying Atmosphere: Movement, Memory, and Colour

Simultaneously, Simões suggests imagined narratives in movement and embodiment. Sometimes, revealing no more than the position of a subject’s feet, she tells stories in fragments.

Shot on a friend’s borrowed camera, Simões captures Every Step Carries A Soft Goodbye (2019), a poetic meditation on a moment on Costa da Caparica. Water slows by the shore and reflects over the beachside. The scene shifts subtly between neutral tones of the wet sand and pink hues peeking through the slip. The ground is smooth and space is implied through faint shadows of rippling water and feet.

Simões’ constrained composition and sparse landscape direct the viewer’s attention to the essence of this moment. The texture of the wet fabric clung onto skin, the sand between toes and the weightlessness of the step.

A person's legs are shown walking barefoot on a wet, dark surface, possibly a beach, with the person wearing a short, light-colored, lace-trimmed garment. The image is dimly lit, creating a moody atmosphere. Photograph by Marcia Simoes.

She captures movement and the body in time intimately through sensational details, allowing us to feel the moment. Her framing creates an atmosphere of its own; Simões offers us a story to jump right into, no context or direction needed, just the spontaneity of the experience that she has frozen in time.

A desk with a computer and gifts sits inside a circular enclosure of clear plastic curtains, in a room with teal tiled walls and a floor that resembles swirling water. The desk is silver and round, and a chair is tucked behind it. Photograph by Marcia Simoes.

Colour plays a crucial role in the way Simões conveys atmosphere. Varying from high chroma, black and white, and even contrast levels, she builds atmosphere and narrative out of these decisions. Soft Room (2023) displays this with marbled turquoise tiles that anchor the room in the space, while warm orange reflections ripple across the plastic, lending to the dreamlike uncertainty of this interior. An empty chair sits at the desk, embraced by a translucent film curtain, diffused at the edges and turning the room into a psychological landscape rather than a functional one.

A blurred, dark statue of a person with outstretched arms stands in front of a wall with a bas-relief carving of figures and text, with marble columns and a ceiling with recessed lights in the background. The statue is out of focus, while the background elements are slightly more defined. Photograph by Marcia Simoes.

In a visual culture driven by immediacy and precision, Márcia Simões’ practice insists on the value of seeking the poetics in imprecise moments. Simões’ photography is an exploration of how we move through spaces, landscapes, and our bodies with curiosity for stories.

Her images remind us that reality is not only what stands clearly before us, but also what flickers at its edges: memory, anticipation, and hope. In atmospheric moments suspended in time, she opens a quiet passage between what is seen and what is felt—and invites us to step inside.

Márcia Simões’ work can be found on her Format portfolio, with ongoing projects shared on Instagram.

The image shows two photographs side-by-side: on the left, a close-up of purple flowers in a garden, and on the right, a beach scene with a child leading a dark horse along the shoreline, with people swimming and sunbathing in the background. Photography portfolio website of Marcia Simoes, aka Masimmo.

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Collaboratore

Saanya Chopra

Saanya Chopra is an interdisciplinary artist and writer, based in Ottawa. Working across painting, object-making, installation, and text, her work inhabits the intersections between material forms and language. She completed a BFA in painting and creative writing, receiving the Ottawa Art Gallery Graduating Student Award of Excellence.

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