"The Atlas of Beauty" Photo Exhibition

We are two days away from the 31st edition of Sibiu International Theatre Festival which kept my blog busy lately, and today is finally the last part of my experience attending the edition from 2023. Cheers to myself for finishing these posts before FITS 2024, woohoo!

But leaving jokes aside, today's part of the festival is a bit different from what you've seen before and that's also why I wanted to create a separate post for this experience.

The photo exhibition known as The Atlas of Beauty was presented in more parts of the world, as well as in my country before, but last year it became part of the festival allowing the attendants to enjoy this experience for free and even meet and greet with the person behind all of this. Sadly, we (I and my twin sister) didn't manage to get there in time and meet Mihaela Noroc who is the idol of my sister when it comes to photography, but at least we enjoyed some good moments at her exhibition and managed to capture quite a few pictures to show to you as well.

The author of the exhibition travelled to almost 100 different countries in the last 10 years, from where she returned with plenty of pictures taken of women, each coming with her own life story. Her project was unique at the time was started and quickly became a worldwide phenomenon with thousands of articles written internationally, 1.5 billion fans, and a printed album with a lot more stories and pictures than those at the exhibition, written in 6 different languages.

While some people tend to look at the exhibition as a different way of travelling the world by admiring international beauty and cultures, The Atlas of Beauty represents a manifest of love and hope based on real-life stories.

On a quick look, there was a full wall dedicated to no less than 110 unique pictures, but as you get closer you will notice that some of them do say a story a lot louder than the others, which often leads to turning around and looking for a specific picture in the crowd with the hope that you will find next to it the little info box with the story.

The same happened to me when I noticed a very beautiful lady but who could already tell that her life was not that beautiful. The picture was taken in Afghanistan, and sadly, not long after the photographer left the place she found out that this lady was killed in a shooting fire.

A similar situation happened with another woman who made it to the Atlas of Beauty and who was basically smiling with the thought that more people would find out her story, but she knew for a fact that not much time was left for her, also belonging to regions in this world where wars never stopped.

Another emotional story comes from another strong woman who after she was attacked on the streets she started learning Karate which quickly led to owning her own course and training weekly 30 unique women to know how to protect themselves in front of aggressors.

As sad as some stories seem to be, as funny and happy some others are. In fact, I always thought that beauty is just a matter of taste and if you think someone is ugly is just because you don't have inspiration at that moment to find something beautiful at she/he.

Either way, The Atlas of Beauty is a vast album of hundreds of women of different cultures and origins who have something in common: strength. So even if some of them have a sadder story than others, at the end of the day they all manage to share the same emotion and mood no matter if they do it through a smile or not.

There are many stories popping in my head now about those that impressed me the most, but I'd like to let the images speak for themselves as they will definitely do a better job than I'll ever be able to.

In case this stirs your curiosity but you are not sure when or how you could attend the exhibition, then you might want to check out this link. It will take you to the official page of the author where you can read more stories than these I managed to capture with my phone camera, as well as order your very own book if interested which even has a sale of 45% at the moment I'm writing this so I think it's totally worth it!

Plus, this is just the first part of the book with over 500 portraits of women and stories, while the 2nd book is already in the making!

P.S.: I'm not sure if @erikah have seen this already but since she's the queen of exhibitions on here I thought I'd let her know. ❤️

This post represents the last part of the FITS 2023 experience, but FITS 2024 is starting this Friday so do expect lots of fresh content with this purpose soon!

FITS 2023 posts:

• FITS 2023 - Part 1
• FITS 2023 - Part 2
• FITS 2023 - Part 3
• FITS 2023 - Part 4
• FITS 2023 - Part 5
• FITS 2023 - Part 6
• FITS 2023 - Part 7

FITS 2022 posts:

• FITS 2022 - Part 1
• FITS 2022 - Part 2
• FITS 2022 - Part 3
• FITS 2022 - Part 4
• FITS 2022 - Part 5
• FITS 2022 - Part 6

^{Gabriela Travels is the FOUNDER of "Festival Mania" who started this community from the passion of attending various festivals and with the purpose of encouraging more people to explore festivals all around the world and share their experiences. At the same time, Gabriela is an independent Graphic Design Freelancer since 2019 completing over 600+ orders in this time and collaborating with various businesses and people from all over the globe. Additonally, Gabriela has her own corner on the internet since 2017 where she writes various articles for her blog, the most popular being the travel ones (300+ articles written on this field), but also abording other topics as well, like game reviews, movie and series reviews, photography posts, cooking recipes and more, boosting the total number of articles written to 700+ blog posts. Gabriela is also a gamer since she was 11 years old and gaming remains one of her biggest passions along with traveling, editing, cooking, and doing various sports activities.}

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