CHANGE HOW YOU SEE…

Change how you see, see how you change. This is the motto of a man named Rick Guidotti. Professional photographer, world changer, and founder of Positive Exposure. I have been fortunate enough to meet Rick a few times and his story is amazing. So amazing that it made the blog this week.

I first met Rick in 2011 at a conference in Baltimore where I was speaking about muscular dystrophy. When I meet and get to know people, I always ask them how they landed where they are, which is actually my way of inviting them to open up about their life. When these conversations take place, I begin to believe that the world is not always random, but instead, people come in (and out) of our lives for a purpose. Sometimes many purposes. Rick was at the conference to speak about his organization: Positive Exposure.

Rick spent his early career winning photography awards while working in NYC, Milan, Paris and London for a variety of high profile clients including LIFE magazine, GQ, People, Revlon, and Atlantic Monthly, to name a few. He has photographed Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford and a bunch of other supermodels. Then, in 1997, one random (or not?) moment changed his life. After leaving his studio in Manhattan, he saw a young woman waiting for a bus who was living with albinism. The woman had long white hair, extremely pale skin, and red eyes. As an artist, Rick was taken by her beauty, and began to wonder why some things and people are considered beautiful while others are not. Much later, he booked the young lady for a photo shoot and treated the shoot exactly as he would a super model. Fans blowing, lights, music, studio set…the whole bit. The woman’s smile, in Rick’s words “Lit up all of New York City.” In fact, it eventually was published in LIFE magazine. Before all of that, in an effort to better understand albinism, Rick went to the library and looked through medical textbooks. The images inside were like a punch to the gut: photos lacking all humanity, a strip of black across people’s eyes to block identity, and dehumanizing depiction of disease. From this experience, Rick began to turn his lens toward diversity as a beautiful part of the human condition, and to redefine what we see as “beauty.”

Since then, Rick has devoted his life to traveling the globe, collaborating with advocacy organizations, non-profits, medical schools, universities and other educational institutions to effect change in societal attitudes towards individuals living with physical, genetic, behavioral or intellectual difference. His work is breathtaking. I urge you to visit his site: positive exposure.org, and watch his TED talk. He is a humble, down to earth human that the whole world needs to know about. He has photographed some of my friends and their families living with Duchenne and Becker MD, and recently invited me to his studio in NYC to see where the magic takes place. These days, he is rarely there, but he has a full staff of photographers and artists working with him and setting up galleries and exhibits all over the place. I will visit. Details will follow.

In the meantime, as I sat speaking with him more than a decade ago, I told him that I had a Cindy Crawford swimsuit poster in my college drum practice room for “inspiration.” He asked me to describe the poster. The perfect ending would be for me to tell you that he took the photo. He didn’t. Instead, he taught me that beauty is everywhere if we slow down and know how to look for it. Most important, we need not look in the traditional sense, but we must continue to redefine the word. Beauty is the human spirit and the realization that everyone deserves to feel beautiful because we are.

Stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned.