Seventy percent of women don’t see themselves reflected in media images. “Grey’s Anatomy” creator Shonda Rhimes revealed this startling statistic at the the 2019 edition of Cannes Lions, an advertising and communications fest. The TV titan is hoping to address this lack of representation with #ShowUs, a photography database she launched in partnership with Dove. According to Variety, #ShowUs contains over 5,000 images of diverse women and nonbinary folks and seeks to “promote more accurate representations in the press and advertising.”
For #ShowUs, Dove and Getty Images teamed up to create Girlgaze, a photography company, in order to “to make a series of photos that really represent a different kind of beauty,” Rhimes explained. Girlgaze photographers captured images of “women as they are versus the very narrow stereotype of women who we generally see in advertisements and magazines.” “We all see that same kind of stereotypically beautiful woman in an ad,” Rhimes said, seemingly referring to the ubiquitous willowy white blonde who dominates magazines and commercials. “We want to see women who look like us.”
In other words, thin, femme white women should not be the media’s default symbol of womanhood. Ads and images should reflect the world we live and include women of color, queer women, women of all shapes and sizes, and nonbinary individuals.
As Rhimes told Variety, representation — or lack thereof — can have a huge impact on young women and their self-esteem. When you don’t see anyone who looks like you in magazines or on TV, “you feel invisible or you feel erased.” She remembered, “The only woman I saw in television who looked a little bit different, who had a different body type, was Oprah when I was growing up.”
#ShowUs won’t only feature women and nonbinary people in front of the camera: the images themselves will be taken by women and nonbinary photographers. “Therefore, the images that are getting chosen are images that probably wouldn’t be chosen if you had just used the same male photographers,” Rhimes said. “Who takes the pictures makes the difference in the pictures that are taken. Who’s behind the scenes doing something tells the story of what you’re seeing.”
Rhimes and Dove previously worked together on Real Beauty Productions, a film project that told consumer stories in an effort to address the disparity between women in the real world and the women portrayed onscreen.
“Grey’s Anatomy” recently became the longest-running medical drama in television history. It will return for its 16th season this fall. Rhimes’ upcoming projects include a series based on Jessica Pressler’s New York Magazine feature about con artist/phony socialite Anna Delvey, developed as part of her multi-year deal with Netflix. She exec produces “How to Get Away with Murder” and “Grey’s” spinoff “Station 19.”
