Carla Rossi – 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.

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.