Dove Uses Self-Portrait Photography Class and Exhibition to Help Redefine Beauty
If your advertising campaign’s goal is to redefine beauty and help High School girls accept and even embrace the flaws so studiously eliminated on magazine covers, you’ve got an uphill battle ahead of you. But Dove is fighting (and maybe even winning) that battle, and one of the ways they’re doing it is by putting the selfie to more empowering use.
The short doc Selfie, embedded above, shows how the company used the expertise of professional photographer Michael Crook and the oft-mocked ‘selfie’ to help High School girls and their mothers embrace the unique traits that they have, over the years, tried their best to hide.
The process involved giving the girls a photography workshop on the power of self-portraiture (much better term than selfie workshop, in our humble opinion) and then sending the girls home to take pictures of themselves that purposely incorporate the parts of them they didn’t like.
Those photos were then put up on display in an interactive exhibit where people were encouraged to write something they liked about the picture on a sticky note and attach it to the portrait.
In the end, of course, this is a marketing campaign, but the video struck a chord with us regardless. The practice of excessive retouching is so abhorred that some of that hate is spilling over onto photography as a whole. But photography is, or at the very least it can be, a great source for good.
To learn more about the Beauty Is campaign or ‘join the conversation’ with your own selfie, head over to the Dove website here.
(via PetaPixel Reader Tip)
