Nima Benati is first and foremost an artist of herself, and then an established 30-year-old fashion photographer. She has managed to sign Vogue Arabia covers and several covers for Vanity Fair Italy (including Aurora Ramazzotti’s with her baby bump). Her highly followed social profiles reflect the aesthetics of her photographs: glamorous, exaggerated, over the top, dreamy. Nima Benati told the director of Vanity Fair Italy, Simone Marchetti, in an interview for WOLF that as a teenager she worked as a waitress to buy photography equipment. She had seen a fashion magazine in a shop and was attracted to something else. The word spread thanks to Facebook and more and more requests arrived, even from outside Bologna. Nima comes home from school every afternoon and starts shooting: she does everything herself, makeup, hair, finds the clothes, sets up the lights. She quickly realizes that her photographs are worth more than the 30-50 euros she initially asked for. Nima Benati has been really smart, also thanks to her mother, who taught her to put the important things first, like buying her first photography studio and then a house in Milan. Have you ever felt discriminated against because you didn’t follow the canonical path of photography studies? “It was one of the most frequent criticisms when I was younger and it hurt me, because it was true and I felt inadequate,” Nima Benati confessed. Now she no longer worries about the judgment of others, only of those she considers a valuable photographer. After many covers and advertising campaigns, she had the honor of being included in the Forbes list of “30 under 30”. Nima Benati’s social profiles tell her aesthetic side, and as an esthete, she decided to change course about a year ago. She started to share her vulnerability too, to remind herself of moments of pain as well as of happiness. She asked herself, why is it socially acceptable to post the highlights of life accompanied by long captions about successes but not the opposite? She wants to leave a trace of her failures too. Nima Benati has never felt any kind of discrimination for being a female photographer, but she admits that her authentic and over-the-top personality has certainly allowed her to be recognized but also closed many doors. Her advice is to always put commitment and dedication first, but she also admits that sometimes a little luck is also needed.
