Book Club #63: Casting a Book about Women by Mattia Baldi

This book project from the Italian photographer Mattia Baldi is called “Casting a Book about Women”. It will be a series of Fine-Art B/W photographic books that want to bring to light the problems of modern aesthetics. Instagram filters, perfect skin retouch, and general drastic image manipulation are today the media standard.

Impossible beauty features are changing the view of society, and especially women, toward aesthetic, creating a digital view of a woman far from reality. The shots for this project will have no digital retouch, or any other kind of alteration in order to show a more sincere way to see beauty. The vibe is not celebratory doesn’t tend to extra-valorize the subjects, wants to be raw content of reality.  www.mattiabaldi.com/the-project

From Mattia Baldi: “Especially here where I’m living, Bangkok, the beauty standards are a complicated matter. Thai people pass more time on SM than anyone else and the young generations are growing up with virtual digital standards of beauty. It will be amazing to realize one book per city all around the world so as to check the status of a wide spectrum of people that are working in the system or that are trying but fail for some aesthetic reason”.

The first book will be all about Bangkok and the models, actresses and dancers professional and beginners that are living and working in Bangkok now. The project will be in the format of one book-volume per city, all around the world. After Bangkok: NewYork, Paris, and Milan.

The project has SM pages in order to create a community of models/women that will share their stories about their castings experiences, appearance insecurities, and how to live life as a woman in the age of digital media, #metoo, and beauty standards. Many young models that have already shot for this project have reacted quite emotionally when they saw how they look like without Photoshop or any form of digital alteration. The smartphones have replaced the mirror and people are gradually forgetting how they actually look like. Digital photography and sophisticated algorithms are changing our perception of reality. This kind of photography can bring back a more honest point of view.

www.mattiabaldi.com/the-project