The Beautiful Crew
This website sets out to document the creative journey a group of young people all from London, travel along as they take part in the Beautiful Photography Project 2010.
In early summer 2010 Wellcome Collection and Hidden Cities, the organisers of the Bloomsbury Festival 2010 approached a number of youth and community groups within the Bloomsbury area to come up with project ideas that would engage young people in making a creative contribution to the festival and at the same time introduce them to the Wellcome Collection.
The project documented on this site comes from an idea put forward by Y Touring Theatre Company & One KX, two operations of Central YMCA. Central YMCA is currently leading a campaign around body confidence/body image. Each of it’s 5 operations which include a gym, a training operation, a qualifications provider , a community activation centre and a touring theatre company, are contributing to the campaign in their own unique but complementary way providing the charity with a 360 degree approach to one of the biggest challenges to our well being .
Beautiful is an exploration of the subject of body image and body confidence. Using the medium of photography, 15 young people will produce a large scale outdoor photography exhibition at the Bloomsbury Festival, the centre piece of which will be a large photographic mosaic housed at the Wellcome Collection.
As part of their journey the 15 young photographers will learn about the art of digital photography, interview techniques and the skill involved in putting an exhibition together part of that process will involve them working with other young people, interviewing them and photographing them capturing their thoughts, feelings, fantasies and fears about their body image.
Beautiful 
would love to be involved with the project … am really interested in the whole body size body facism debate… would love to volunteer as a model for the project as a woman who has struggled to feel comortable an d at ease in her own body
Would love to be involved in this project! I myself am doing a campaign about womens natural bodies, diversity and airbrushing
Do email me as i’d love to be involved, even if that doesnt mean as a model in this!
Also have a look at the campaign!
http://www.battlefront.co.uk/the-campaigns/natural-beauty-keeping-it-real/#18541
http://www.twitter.com/keepbeautyreal
http://www.youtube.com/keepbeautyreal
& Also we have facebook, so just type in Natural Beauty; keeping it Real! x
An ambiguous project that people can interpret as they wish! Nice variety of activities that explore peoples perseptions of themselves and the media!
Nearly Christmas and we say bring on the food.
I liked that we were asked to create something about our ‘perfect’ woman..it really made you consider what we’ve accepted as beautiful. I do wish that we would be able to talk more about our own image..all in all a very good experience and important for women and men to think about…
Do you mean important for men to think about in terms of whay they are attrected to certain body types/what they see as their ‘perfect’ woman’ etc? Or important for men in terms of what they have accepted as handsome, ideal male body, the ‘perfect’ man etc?
Interesting way to spend a morning, lots os fun! Makes you think about how you and other people see themselves. When it came down to it I guess I don’t dislike my body as much as I thought which was a bit of a revelation!!
Really interesting project – being asked to articulate what it is that you dislike about your body really makes you reassess your reasons for disliking it in the first place.
Really great project. I feel activities like this should be run more often to encourage high self-esteem amongst young people. We are bogged down by images of perfection in the media everyday and the period of youth is where we are most impressionable. Carrying out ventures like this are imperative to ensuring that the youth have a positive outlook on who they are are.
Is this only for females or did males get the opportunity to explore how they feel about their bodies, how media images influence them into not liking their bodies, thinking that they need to have a certain type of body etc?
This was an event for both males and females. As an organisation we are fully aware that the issues we are dealing with affect both genders and we openly invited both men and women to take part in the project to give a broader and more representative response to the stimulus.
On the day we did have a number of men turn up to take part around 20% of our models were male. In an ideal world we would have liked 50 – 50 but the idea of talking about their body image/confidence is something that we have found women are more responsive to than men.
Many of the men involved in the project stated that they had never really thought about the issues we were talking about and found it a very positive and interesting process. Hopefully with more projects like this taking place we will be able to open up a fully honest discourse between males & females around body image and body confidence.