First Year, International student Vanessa Carvalho talks about her work for the TV Box Set, Book, Film brief and T-Mobile brief as part of the Introduction to Editorial and Advertising module.
7th December 2019
A few months ago, I came across Naomi Wolf’s work, The Beauty Myth – How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women and while reading it, I felt so inspired that I began to reconsider a few things in my life. We all know that society’s need for physical perfection has deeply affected people’s mental and physical health. We all feel pressured to look a certain way, and because of this, we are never happy with what we already are or have.
What I’ve tried to portray in this series, is the idea that we are so imprisoned by stereotypes that we don’t actually know how beautiful we are; we are so trapped in society’s “set of rules” that we cannot truly see ourselves. As a consequence of that, we end up losing ourselves in this obsession of looking perfect. We silence that part of us that feels that we might not be how we actually want to be, but we feel that if we don’t do what we are supposed to, we are going to be left behind.
Since the T-Mobile brand shows a way of life, not only the product, I decided to show something that could be nostalgic and create an identity within the advert, without actually having a cell phone in the photograph.
I wanted to show that even when we grow up, our interaction with our friends doesn’t change much. The object itself might change, but we carry the same people and habits with us. And to me, it’s a humorous way to show that people still know what this activity is. T-Mobile is known for its informal imagery, showing real peoples’ lives.