Nadia Bautista: Intimate and Natural Female Portraits

Feminist Photographer Nadia Bautista

     As a creative way to show our opinion and to combat against hegemonic discourse, photography is maybe the most transparent medium. Nowadays, feminist photographers are struggling against social and cultural norms that created a typical model of women’s body and discourse that maintain dominant aesthetic. Those photographers formed a wide net of individuals willing to release a human body of the pressure and show its beauty. But it wasn’t always so simple for those, mostly women photographers. For a young photographer Nadia Bautista, aka Miss Complejo, challenges of contemporary feminist photography are also a permanent source of her inspiration. She neglects all kinds of authoritative views on women’s body and constantly tries to emphasize the simple elegance of her models.

Artistic Background

Nadia Bautista is a young photographer born and raised in  Buenos Aires, Argentina. She started photography after college and soon after became recognized as a portray feminist photographer focusing on a female body.

 I can find beauty in all kind of bodies.

Who is Miss Complejo?

The photographer calls herself Miss Complejo or Miss Complex. The name has two meanings. First, it refers to all inner complexes that can restrict her. The second meaning of her nickname signifies limitless of the others that cannot understand women’s nudity as something natural. In the beginning, Nadia used to take photos as a way of catharsis and started to share images with others. As the photographer said, it wasn’t easy to take place in the photography world surrounded by the macho model of beauty. But, Nadia succeeded in her idea to represent real, authentic female body to a wide audience and connect with those who were in search of a different, not established kind of women’s beauty.

Nadia’s work shows female body in the most natural way, emphasizing particular parts of it. The young photographer searches for intimate and hidden signs in all models she photographs.

I get to know [my subjects] as I photograph them… What I seek in people are their gestures. I want to find something about them that makes them unique.