Five years away from her native South Africa, Jodi Bieber - best known for award-winning reportage assignments - was contemplating a change of approach, and thinking about moving back home. She'd just published her first book, Between Dogs and Wolves, an unflinchingly personal take on post-Apartheid gang culture in her home town of Johannesburg shot in gritty black-and-white (BJP, 15 November 2006), and was now shooting in colour. She wanted to shoot differently, and everything was in flux, but during this period of self-assessment, she found inspiration in an unlikely source - Rankin's 'Real Beauty' adverts for Dove.

'Ads don't usually get to me,' she says, 'but that one really made me stop and think. It showed five normal women, not models, with all their lumps and bumps. Then I met a high-end fashion model who said, "Look at me, I have bags under my eyes because they flew me in to London from New York, but they'll just take the images and put them through Photoshop". It made me question the way images of beauty are presented in the media.'

Bieber was living in London at the time, but when she returned to Johannesburg in 2007, she found the idea even more relevant. For the first time in South Africa, there are reports that black women, newly influenced by Western media conceptions of beauty, are falling prey to anorexia. 'It's something that would never have happened before because voluptuous women have always been considered sexy in that community.'

Positive action

Bieber decided on her own form of positive action, devising a project in which she shot ordinary South African women who embody a different kind of beauty - the inner kind. Deciding to show them semi-clothed, with their perceived imperfections fully on show, it proved difficult to find women willing to take part at first.

So she took a far-reaching approach, printing up forms stating what the project was about and distributing them to every woman she met, from her hairdresser to supermarket cashiers, and posted notices on women's community websites. In total, she photographed 45 subjects, representing a broad cross-section of South Africans - black and white, young and old, fat and thin - at home, in various states of undress

Bieber photographed in the women's homes, partly to make them more comfortable, and partly to provide some background detail on their lives. Each shoot took from 45 minutes to three hours, and the women chose how much or how little to wear, beyond agreeing to strip to their underwear. They also chose how to pose, something that initially caused Bieber some heartache.

'I wanted to show how presented themselves, but at first I found some of the poses embarrassing,' she says. 'Now I don't feel that way at all. They way they presented themselves was influenced by what they see in magazines and on TV, so it's an essential part of the project. But the women who agreed to do it all believed in what the project stood for. They had this sense of inner confidence, which comes through in their portraits.'

Female perspective

In addition to photographing them, Bieber asked her subjects about their attitudes to their bodies, and now presents the images with recordings or transcriptions of these interviews. The self-funded project took a year in total, and was shot on film. It would have been impossible to do, she says, without Kodak's sponsorship, as the company provided her with film for free.

Although she still hopes to get the story published by a newspaper in the UK, Real Beauty (she adopted the same title as the Dove campaign) is attracting lots of interest elsewhere. It took first place in the Portrait Series category of the Pictures of the Year International competition, and 30 images from the project were exhibited last November at the Goodman Gallery, South Africa's most prominent photography space, which also represents countrymen such as David Goldblatt, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, and Mikhael Subotzky. Bieber printed each image 1.5m high to make them life-size, and played the interviews with the women on a continuous loop. The response was overwhelming.

'The gallery said attendance at the exhibition was the best ever, and it included people who never usually go to a gallery,' says Bieber. 'I got a lot of messages, many from women saying how touching they found it.

I relate to it too, because I'm in my forties, and my body has changed,' she adds. 'I bring that female perspective to the project. But although I was thinner in the past, I think I'm more comfortable with how I am now. I'm more at ease.'

That sense of involvement was vital. Bieber is a world-class photojournalist, and has picked up eight World Press Photo awards for work shot everywhere from Las Vegas to Uganda, but she likes her personal work to be just that - personal.

'It's been really good for me to come back to South Africa,' she says. 'I was in Paris and London for five years and it was great, but it always felt like a fantasy. South Africa is the place I know best and am most connected to. I'm happiest and most creative here.'

Visit jodibieber.com.