“I’m a 29 years old photographer from Bucharest,
Romania. I love to travel and I visited more than 60 countries until now,
with my backpack and my camera.
I like modern boulevards from Tokyo, or crowded
streets from New York, but also remote communities of Africa or Amazonia, where
locals live like 200 years ago and I can sleep in their homes.
I love the variety of earth, the diversity of people
and I try to go beyond their surface, to discover their sincere and authentic
side, to photograph it.
In the last years I worked hard, saved some money and
started an independent unique project about women from all around the world:
The Atlas of Beauty. I spend all my savings traveling to 37 countries, and now
I look forward to find funds and continue.”
Diversity is the
key to a new understanding of beauty, proposes Mihaela Noroc of ‚The Atlas of
Beauty’. As nearly every woman is grappling with the concept of beauty during
her lifetime, we had a closer look at Mihaela’s project.
I went to an all-girls’ high school, and I remember
very vividly my favourite teacher telling us teenage girls that only those
quirks and supposed flaws are what make every single one of us unique. ‘If
everybody looked perfect, there’d be no beauty’, she said, and all of us nodded,
flattened by logic but ultimately unconvinced. Because who wouldn’t want a
symmetrical face with high cheekbones, perfectly arched and full brows, full
lips, and a slim nose? Blemish free, please?
My Instagram feed shows me, though, that we may be
well underway to a beauty ideal that makes women look more and more alike. And
it feels like nearly everybody is doing the same makeup, no matter what:
contoured face, full brows that look alike, whether they are natural or drawn
on. Mihaela’s remark ‘maybe in 50 years all women from all around the world
will dress and act the same’ scares me quite a bit, because it’s not only a
possibility, it’s a quite likely picture, given that our world, thanks to all
technical advances, becomes smaller nearly every day.
The
idea
Does the world become smaller, or does it become
larger? Two years ago, that question didn’t matter that much to Mihaela, who
gave up her job and her old life in Romania to travel the world. She travelled
to 37 countries across all continents (Antarctica is still missing, though) and
took pictures of women. She had the idea for what became ‘The Atlas of Beauty’
in Ethiopia, where she saw women with both Arabian and African heritage, who
retained their traditional look and fashion in an increasingly modernized and
westernized world. That fascinated her. She started to take pictures of women.
She makes sure that her pictures aren’t just portraits, too. The women she
photographs are always surrounded by something their culture stands for.
With The Atlas of Beauty, Mihaela wants to show the
faces of the world and that every woman she took a picture of is beautiful, so
showing each country’s unique concept of beauty. Why women? Why are they all
young? “I chose a group I’m part of. And in adhering to that age group, beauty
becomes comparable”, she claims.
She finds the women she photographs through different
channels. Some are chance meetings in the street, some she finds on social
media, and one of the most striking portraits pictures a woman she met while
couchsurfing who was initially her local guide (it’s the first picture of this
post and shows a woman in a mosque in Iran).
Concept
of beauty
When I had a look at the women pictured in the Atlas
of Beauty, I was suddenly overwhelmed by all these beautiful faces – they all
became a blur of regular features, exotic backgrounds. While it’s very clear
that all these women are from different areas of the world, there seems to be a
common denominator in the women Mihaela takes pictures of. Symmetrical faces,
wide eyes, straight noses, full lips, slim figures. Is that Mihaela’s concept
of beauty (after all, she decides which woman to photograph) or is it a concept
of beauty that is found all over the world? I decided to ask her, but sadly she
didn’t reply to my email.
The notion that facial symmetry
is beautiful is a concept that seems hardwired into our (Western) brains, going
back to the ancient Greeks. I’d love to see more diversity in her pictures, but
then, Mihaela’s project is called ‘The Atlas of Beauty’, and not the ‘Atlas of
Women’ (which I would’ve loved). So in the end, the Atlas can’t answer my
questions about what is considered beautiful in different countries and how
that is filtered down through the lens of a woman with a specific background.
But what still resonates with me is Mihaela’s approach to challenge that notion
of beauty that comes from copying another person and another lifestyle. Is that
overdrawn nude lip and contoured and highlighted face really yours? And why are
you doing it? For everybody who loves makeup, it’s a
fine line to tread. There’s something for concealing features I’m not happy
with, adding some false lashes to my sparse ones, let my nose appear smaller.
Maybe we should start emphasize features we like more and hide the ones we
don’t like less. Or, like Mihaela said: “In the end, the original is better
than a copy.” Be the original. With makeup or without.
Mihaela
wants to continue to travel and take photos of women from each country of the
globe, making The Atlas Of Beauty a mirror of societies and an inspiration for
people who try to remain authentic. “The project should be a witness of my
era’s cultures and traditions”, she says. Mihaela wants to travel again in June
2015. You can find her on Instagram, facebook and her blog.
All
images © Mihaela Noroc
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