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The next picture shows Jackie from Winnipeg, Canada. In the 60s in Canada, when indigenous children living on reserves were taken away from their families and tribes and were brought to cities to be adopted or to be sent to attend boarding schools, Jackie was separated from her brother and sisters and was left to grow up at a boarding school. She found herself alone and without hope so she got in trouble ending up in jail. But this was not as bad as you can imagine because while being in detention Jackie discovered her talent and started to paint. Thanks to her amazing paintings, her life finally had a meaning, woman in jail started noticing and even buying her art. With hope in her life, Jackie decided she wanted to study, so after being released she started her studies in fine arts at the University of Manitoba. Having achieved her goal, Jackie was determined to use her talent in order to raise awareness about the nightmare hundreds of indigenous women go through, like disappearances, murders, forced displacement, and suicide. That's why First Nations women are the main theme of her paintings. Jackie has an incredible strength and thanks to her effort she overcame the obstacles that life put in her path.
Finally, for the perfect wrap up, there's Estefania from Medellin with her beautiful curly hair and big eyes. She has the weirdest combination and that's what makes her amazingly stunning because beautifulness is about diversity and differences. Mihaela Noroc had to travel to 50 different countries and take hundreds of pictures to demonstrate this and prove there is no such thing as a perfect woman they’re just women that are beautiful no matter their races, heights, weights or hair. I invite you to take a look and read more stories like this at the book’s webpage: theatlasofbeauty.com.
By: Alejandra Rangel 10A
Five years ago Mihaela Noroc left her ordinary life, quit her job and put all of her savings into an adventure that resulted in 500 portraits and stories. With just a backpack and her camera, Mihaela started traveling all around the world capturing the unnoticed beauty, diversity, and stories in simple portraits that today make up “The Atlas of Beauty” which was published last year. Behind every single picture and woman in it, there is a story, and out of those hundreds of stories, I would like to highlight two of them because of the capability of the photos to make you feel a real connection with those women.
This portrait of two Yazidi (northern Mesopotamia) children a year ago in a refugee camp from the Kurdistan Region in Iraq, is the proof of hope. Thousands of people from their community have been killed in the last 4 years just because they are different. This genocide was a consequence of religious intolerance, but don’t be wrong, this was not a one-time event. Sometimes the victims are Yazidis, other times the victims are Muslims or Christians. Oh, and I forgot to mention the gender, ethnicity, race or sexual orientation discrimination, as a consequence of intolerance and hate. Although violence is a reality and it is always much closer than we think, there she is sitting with tranquility and with a smile on her face teaching us all that hope must not be lost and that a different, better ending to the story may be ahead.
