TECNO has partnered with Brazilian-Spanish visual artist Angélica Dass for a global portrait project that begins in Nairobi and asks a timely question: as AI becomes more involved in how images are captured, edited, and understood, can technology represent people more truthfully?
The project, titled “100 Portraits of Becoming,” will see Dass photograph 100 people across five countries over two years. Kenya is the starting point, before the project moves to the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Brazil. The portraits will be published online as part of what TECNO describes as a “Living Archive” of human stories, identity, and representation.
At the centre of the campaign is a simple but important issue: phone cameras and AI imaging systems have not always treated all skin tones equally. For years, many smartphone cameras have struggled with darker skin tones, often over-brightening, underexposing, or flattening the details that make a person look like themselves. TECNO is framing this project as both an artistic archive and a technology statement around fairer imaging.
The portraits will be shot using the TECNO CAMON 50 Ultra, powered by TECNO Universal Tone Technology. According to the release, Universal Tone uses TECNO’s multi-skin-tone colour card featuring 372 skin tones and counting, alongside a large skin tone database designed to improve how cameras capture different complexions.
This is where the project becomes more than just another brand campaign. TECNO is trying to connect mobile photography, AI, identity, and culture in a way that feels especially relevant in markets like Kenya, where millions of people use smartphones as their main camera, creative tool, and gateway to the internet.
Angélica Dass is best known for Humanæ, a global portrait series that challenged how society thinks about race and skin colour. Her work has been featured in major global spaces including the World Economic Forum, UNESCO, the Migration Museum in London, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Her 2016 TED Talk on skin and identity has reached more than two million viewers.
For Dass, the new TECNO collaboration is not just about documenting faces. It is about creating room for people to be seen beyond assumptions.
“My portrait practice has always been less about documenting appearance and more about creating space for people to exist beyond assumptions,” Dass said in the announcement. “Being visible is not the same as being understood.”
The Nairobi launch is also intentional. Kenya is described in the release as one of the world’s youngest populations and a country often associated with innovation, mobile money, and the “Silicon Savannah” narrative. But the project argues that global media and AI-generated images still often reduce places like Kenya to inherited stereotypes rather than lived complexity.
That is why the first portraits will feature Kenyans from different walks of life, including entrepreneurs, farmers, dancers, artists, and everyday creators. One of the Kenyan participants, Alexander Odhiambo, co-founder of enterprise software company Solutech Limited, summed up the spirit of the project clearly: “People are always quick to tell you what you are and where you fit. I stopped waiting for that. The story that counts is the one I’m writing myself.”
The first portraits and stories are expected to go live online in early August, after which the project will continue its rollout across the other four countries.
For TECNO, this is a chance to position its camera technology around something deeper than megapixels, sensors, or AI beautification. The company is saying the future of imaging should not only be about making people look better, but about making sure they are represented accurately, fairly, and with dignity.
That is a big claim. But it is also the right conversation to have now, especially as AI tools increasingly decide how people are lit, softened, corrected, labelled, and sometimes misrepresented in images.
With 100 Portraits of Becoming, TECNO is betting that better imaging is not just a technical issue. It is a human one.
