Students’ Powerful Photo Campaign Calls Out Social Media for Body Image Pressures

Who hasn’t sat scrolling their social media feed and felt increasingly terrible? From heavily edited selfies portraying seemingly perfect bodies, to softly filtered lifestyle shots of seemingly perfect lives, it’s no surprise one in five of us say social media makes us feel depressed.

Noticing the impact it was having on her own self-esteem, British student Jade Johnson decided to call out social media for creating a pressure to conform to unrealistic ideals. During her second year of college, Jade felt herself being “sucked” into constantly striving for social-media perfection. Noticing that she received more likes for the images that were edited and fewer for those that were more natural, she found it increasingly hard to extricate herself from an online image that didn’t really reflect her true self.

“I […] built my personal profile around this, even though deep down it made me feel terrible as I was no longer being who I wanted to, but what social media wanted me to be,” Johnson said in a statement emailed to Mashable.

So with fellow Birmingham City University student Laura Dawkes, the 22-year-old photography student decided that for her final project, she would make a visual campaign highlighting the pressures brought on by social media.

The campaign, called UnEdit, is a collection of images that portray an extreme version of what some women feel and think when they scroll through social media.

From taking selfies after mock cosmetic surgery, to wrapping their bodies in plastic, the images show women in a range of situations and are accompanied with words and poems that aim to call out the body-shaming culture that is rampant on social media.

“The campaign was built to show women we do not need to give into the pressures of social media, and we should be proud of who we are rather than letting it bring us down,” Jade explained to Mashable.

“We wanted UnEdit to build us back up and give women that confidence to believe they are beautiful.”

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