Bellissima

Beautiful-for whom? Through Carla Rossi's lens, beauty is not a fixed idea but a performance, shaped, repeated, and refined in response to the gaze of others.In Bellissima, Rossi photographs Rebecca, a young contestant she met during the Miss Italia selections, tracing her journey from casting calls to national auditions and uncovering a system driven by spectacle, competition, and the tireless pursuit of a narrowly defined ideal of femininity.The images take shape like a choreographed sequence, where the frame becomes a stage for repetition, tension, and interruption. Each gesture-a hand on the hip, a forced smile, a sideways glance-reflects the visual grammar of Italian glamour shows, commercial spectacle, and fashion: codified, internalized, and tirelessly repeated. These movements are not spontaneous; they are learned through years of watching others perform them. By juxtaposing pixelated archival footage from Miss Italia broadcasts with her own staged portraits, Rossi examines how beauty is manufactured-by television crews, by audiences, by the women themselves. In a visual culture still shaped by patriarchal ideals, Bellissima reflects on beauty not as a static result, but as a process of reframing the self as visible, staged, and always up for negotiation-but only relevant as long as someone keeps watching.
 The project is supported by Strategia Fotografia 2024, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.