About this item

Based on the author's online photography project, this stunning collection features portraits of 500 women from more than 50 countries, accompanied by revelatory captions that capture their personal stories. Since 2013 photographer Mihaela Noroc has traveled the world with her backpack and camera taking photos of everyday women to showcase the diversity of beauty all around us. The Atlas of Beauty is a collection of her photographs celebrating women from all corners of the world, revealing that beauty is everywhere, and that it comes in many different sizes and colors. Noroc's colorful and moving portraits feature women in their local communities, ranging from the Amazon rainforest to London city streets, and from markets in India to parks in Harlem, visually juxtaposing the varied physical and social worlds these women inhabit. Packaged as a gift-worthy, hardcover book, The Atlas of Beauty presents a fresh perspective on the global lives of women today.



About the Author

Mihaela Noroc

I used to say that I live in Romania, but in the past 4 years I've been traveling almost continuously and the whole world became my home. I've spent most of my life in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, a country roughly equidistant from Western Europe, Middle East, and Northern Africa. The 1990s, when I was growing up, were difficult years in Eastern Europe, with a lot of unemployment and poverty. As a result, my family moved often. Almost every year I would be sent to a new school, have to get used to a new neighborhood and make new friends. Back then, I struggled each time I had to leave one group of friends for another, move from one at to another, but years later I realized that this gave me the capacity to adapt in so many new environments. My father is a painter so I spent my childhood surrounded by his paintings, enjoying the diversity of colors. When I was 16, he gave me an old, second-hand camera. I was too shy to go on the streets and take photos of strangers, so my first subjects were my mother and my sister. That's how I started to photograph women, in a natural and very low-key way. At night, when my family was sleeping, the bathroom was mine and I would transform it into a darkroom to print my photos. I went to college to study photography, but received little encouragement from my professors. These were the years of the digital boom, when everybody started buying cameras and I saw myself as just another average photographer surrounded by millions of others. I felt that the world didn't need another mediocre artist, so I quit photography. I took work in other fields for money and a practical future, without really enjoying what I was doing. For years I felt that I was in the wrong place, but didn't have the power to escape. Then in 2013 a trip to Ethiopia changed my perspective. It was the moment when I started The Atlas of Beauty.



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