Perfect

Photos and text by Gianni Cipriano

The greatest perfection is imperfection.

To Aristotle “perfect” meant “complete”, nothing to add or subtract. To Empedocles perfection depends on incompleteness, since the latter possesses a poten- tial for development and improvement. Here lies the paradox formulated by Italian Renaissance philoso- pher Giulio Cesare Vanini. The paradox of perfec- tion is that imperfection is perfect.

I travelled around Italy in search of imperfect beau- ties in six different non-conventional beauty pageants and assigned each of them a symbolic colour:

Miss Chubby, pink;
Miss Trans, purple;
Miss Mediterranean, yellow;

Miss Plastic Surgery, fuchsia;

Miss Drag Queen, orange;

Miss Has-Been, blue.

Six imperfect beauties (due to their weight, clothes, excess of silicone, or age) if compared to the typology of beauty imposed by mass media and the consume- rist society we live in. In Italy, in particular, beauty has become a political tool during the Berlusconi era. Since the 1980’s, his media empire has introduced a culture of luxury and sex to shape his electorate. Italy became in the mean time a country where half- naked beautiful women are plucked from TV studios and elevated into powerful positions. This culture has generated an unprecedented wave of castings and beauty pageants for girls and women of all ages all over Italy.

In response to the aesthetic and political state of my country, I worked on “Perfect”, a series of 36 photo- graphs focusing on how the beauty dictated by our politicized consumerist society is emulated by the masses, and on the link between imperfection and perfection.