Women's Studies 230 students and the Women's Rights Alliance collaborated a photo shoot in order to encourage individuals to believe that societally acceptable images in most magazines and billboards are not ideal images of beautiful. We want people to know that women and men come in all sizes, heights, and colors. Our facial features are all different, as are our hairstyles hair colors, freckles and eyes. We are all different, but we are all beautiful. Beauty is not defined by the media but what is in front of us; our personal physical features, our characteristics are what make us who we are.
After finishing the project, we believe we were successful because of how the participants walked away from the shoot. It reminded a lot of our participants about the thing about themselves they really love. Some of them were uneasy about taking the picture because they thought they looked “bad”, we reminded them that regardless of what they think they see in the mirror, we’re all beautiful in our own way. We also think we were successful because we are now able to walk away with this newfound confidence, and realize that we can’t always listen to what others say about beauty. Small, big, short, tall, dark, light; we’re all special in some way.
We reached out to the Women’s Right Alliance and shared the vision we had for our Action Research Project. Through meetings, we explained to them how the photo shoot would happen and what we were trying to achieve by it:
- Found an ideal location
- Printed out little strips with empowering body image sayings
- Get a whiteboard for all the ‘models’ to write something empowering about them.
- We invited our peers, members of WRA & random students walking through the Holmes Student Center to be participants of the photo shoot.
- Started to shoot!
When NIU students were asked "What makes you beautiful?" they responded...
wOMEN'S STUDIES 230 Members:
We would like to give a big thanks to all of our models*who volunteered! Always remember that beauty is defined by YOU and not societal norms!
*All models agreed and signed to a consent form
*All models agreed and signed to a consent form