Search for content, post, videos

Marina Rosso

Preview

In September 2011 the world’s biggest sperm bank stopped accepting red haired donors for a period as a mere business choice: demand for them was too low compared to the supply.

Every year about 10,000 babies are born worldwide through artificial insemination. Single women who currently represent half of the customer base, tend to select donors based on the search for a dream prince: the perfect man, charming and healthy. Increasingly, new lives are engineered not only with the aim of avoiding severe disabilities or diseases, so-called negative eugenics‚ but also in an attempt to reach a sort of personal ideal: what philosophers call individual or new eugenics. And personal ideals rarely feature red hair.

Against this new form of discrimination linked to specific aesthetic criteria, Marina Rosso acted as a conservation geneticist who classifies the genetic variation of a species in the first step to preserve its diversity and components. She started by creating a matrix that represents the red hair gene through 48 categories, each uniquely combining this feature with five more physical traits (gender, height, build, eye color and hair type). Then she set out on a journey all over Europe looking for real people who could literally embody these categories. The result of her research are 47 portraits (one category is still missing), selected among the 204 shots of people from Italy, United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Poland.

The Beautiful Gene made by the italian photographer Marina Rosso and produced by Fabrica, Benetton‚ communication research center, has been recently published in a book .

BOOK
The Beautiful Gene  
Photographs by Marina Rosso
Publisher: Fabrica
First edition
Pages: 136
Format: 23 x 29 cm
Language: English-Italian
ISBN 978-88-98764-04-4
29€

Marina Rosso: www.marinarosso.com
To buy the book: http://store.fabrica.it/products/the-beautiful-gene

Fabrica: http://www.fabrica.it

Create an account or log in to read more and see all pictures.

Install WebApp on iPhone
Install WebApp on Android