The Other Face Of Domestic Violence

It's easy to mistake New York City's latest public education campaign on domestic violence as someone's yearbook pictures, except for one thing: the small print below each image, which range from "Most likely to be killed by her boyfriend" to "Most likely to marry her abuser."

Senior art director Stu Garrett and senior copywriter Ted McCagg from Young & Rubicam in New York came up with this idea to target high school and college victims of domestic abuse. The ad ran in New York City subways, on buses and go-cards.

McCagg and Garrett were also behind the previous domestic violence campaign, which shocked with pictures of battered women. "Last year, we achieved a very graphic, catch-your-eye effect," says Garrett. "This year, without showing any physical violence, we're catching the same attention." What works is the contrast between the innocent looks of the smiling women and the "brutality of the lines," he adds.

McCagg says the women in the 40 portraits were picked because they looked more like "people you see each day on the street," not models. The agency wanted someone who could capture the women in a "very basic and straightforward" way, so they turned to photographer Janette Beckman, whose clean and vivid portfolio impressed them.

New York-based Beckman recalls the time she was a real school photographer. "They gave me one light, one background, and one stool," she says. "I was trying to recreate that." Using four different backgrounds including one "mottled background" she says she would normally never use, Beckman shot the models in one day with her Hasselblad and an 80mm lens. She had to remind the models to keep it simple ? some of them showed up in party dresses, instead of something they would wear to high school, she says with a laugh. "People feel like they have to pose when they come in front of the camera."

For her, the campaign stands out because people are riveted by the simplicity of the images. Beckman says: "People are burnt out seeing images of battered people and people in wars. They don't see it. It's like wallpaper to them."

* Photographer Chris Sanders shot the latest Eddie Bauer advertising campaign. The ads feature people on location in the city and the countryside, including some close-ups of models in Eddie Bauer gear. The campaign, created by Lowe & Partners SMS in San Francisco, appears in magazines such as Vanity Fair, GQ and Rolling Stone.