Roberta Sant’Anna takes her camera inside a weird and wonderful Brazilian water park

27 year old photographer Roberta Sant’Anna was born and raised in Brazil’s far south. “I was actually born in Porto Alegre, but I grew up in a very small city called Osório,” she tells us. “It’s one of the most windy cities in the country. We spent ten years there before going back to the big city. My childhood was surrounded by nature and we were free to explore our surroundings. The kind of freedom we had there definitely played a big role in the kind of people we became. I think the way I see the world is influenced by the memories I have. My deepest memories, the most image-filled ones, definitely come from there.”

It’s fitting then that it was Parque Aquatico a project shot in the nostalgia-inducing waterparks of Brazil that caught our attention. The series is a closer look at the glossy “professional” waterpark shots which fill our own family photo albums, displaying the deflating reality of a water park trip which can never quite live up to the hype. “It’s quite simple,” the Berlin-based photographer says of Parque Aquatico. “I used to spend summer days in this water park when I was a kid. They were way more simple back then. One day while passing one of them, I was fascinated by the huge creatures they have built. That got me thinking: what is it about theme parks with swimming pools that make a bunch of different people gather to hang out all day in their bikinis? You pay an entrance fee, you go in, you have all services at your disposal. A summer day passes by in this surreal ambient kept safe from the outside by huge dinosaurs and draculas. I was really attracted to this whole idea of a fun collective catharsis. So I took my camera, I paid the fee and I had a lot of fun.”