In her quest to find real beauty, a Romanian photographer quit her job and set on to a journey around the world to pursue her passion – the passion for “real” photography. Traveling to 37 countries on a low budget, photographer Mihaela Noroc photographed women from different countries for her project “The Atlas of Beauty.” Each of her clicks reflects the real beauty of women – inner beauty that is beyond cosmetics, race, class, caste, breed, social status, or money.
The 29-year-old photographer travels around the world to capture in her camera the diversity of natural feminine beauty in different environments and cultures. She finds that beauty is everywhere and that women from each culture have unique traits and features different from the other that add to their beauty. She asserts that you don’t need cosmetic makeup to be beautiful – it’s the inner beauty that counts. This is the real beauty!
Her findings are in contrast to beauty magazines that portray cosmetic beauty as attractive. With a focus on finding real beauty, her clicks are often taken of women walking in the streets or those busy doing their household chores. The photographs capture the sincerity and serenity of women in their twenties.
Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder – and this is exactly what Noroc has found through her travelogue.
The Atlas of Beauty strives to find the diversity on the planet through portraits of women draped in their respective traditional attire from different cultures. Through her pictures, she also captures the status of women in each society – while one picture shows that female are subject to remain covered from head to toe in one cultural setup, another one depicts women liberation, with no bondage, where the fairer sex is free to show off her skin.
Noroc’s motive is to photograph women in their real self, irrespective of their race, religion, culture, or social status. Before photographing them, she strives to make each of her subjects feel special, unique, and proud of her self!
Through “The Atlas of Beauty,” her motive is to compare faces from different locations around the world and show that all women captured in her photos have something beautiful. She believes beauty is more about being natural and sincere, which is so typical of women.
Noroc plans to take photos of women from every single country in the world, with a vision to make The Atlas of Beauty a mirror of our diverse societies. She envisions making her project an inspiration for people to remain authentic and real, without focusing on cosmetic beauty.
