So different, so beautiful!
Rick Guidotti had pretty much all the supermodels in front of the lens. The pictures of the award-winning fashion photographer from New York appeared in all important magazines. Staging a promotional and fashion industry-suited beauty was his business.
But one day, a chance meeting at a bus stop in Manhattan changed his view of beauty. Guidotti saw a twelve-year-old girl with white hair, pale eyes, and pale skin waiting for the bus with her mother. It was the first time he had met a person with albinism. "She was beautiful!" He recalls.
At home, the photographer began to search medical books for images of people with albinism. What he found made him sad and thoughtful: photos of young people with a black plank in front of their faces. He wanted to change that. Guidotti turned to a self-help group and organized a photo shoot - the first of many others in which he staged people with genetic or physical characteristics.
"In my work as a fashion photographer, I've always been dictated to what's beautiful, but I've seen beauty everywhere," says Guidotti. In 1998 he retired from the fashion industry and founded the non-profit organization "Positive Exposure". He wants to change our perception of people who do not conform to the "norm" - in society as well as in medicine. "It's not about what a person has, but who that person is!" Guidotti accompanies Guidotti at work and shows how much power the portrayed draws from it.
Away with compassion, away with fear, away with dictated ideals: beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.
