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 promotion of the book is supported by Strategia Fotografia 2024, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.