Love Me

Another photographer I researched was Zed Nelson. The series I decided to research was 'Love Me'. This is what was said on his website about the series. 

'Love Me reflects on the cultural and commercial forces that drive a global obsession with youth and beauty.

 

Over a period of five years Zed Nelson visited 18 countries across five continents. The project explores how a new form of globalization is taking place, where an increasingly narrow Western beauty ideal is being exported around the world like a crude universal brand.'

We live in a society that celebrates and iconises youth, where the old, the aesthetically average and the fat seem to have been erased from the pages of our glossy magazines, advertising posters and television screens.

"However much we may confidently point the finger at certain industries, we can't deny our own tacit, albeit culturally conditioned, involvement. Like it or not, we are judged, and judge, by appearance. Perhaps we are obsessed with the way our own bodies look because we know how instinctively judgemental we are of the bodies that we look at."

"We have created a world in which there are enormous social, psychological and economic rewards and penalties attached to the way we look. Can any of us honestly say, 'I don't want to be attractive'? Don't we all want to be loved? But have we been brainwashed into believing that in order to be loved we need smaller noses, bigger breasts, tighter skin, longer legs, flatter stomachs and to appear ever youthful? Where does it end?

The body has, in a sense, become just another consumer purchase. Everyone can, in the spirit of our age, go shopping for bodily transformation. Banks now offer loans for plastic surgery. American families with annual incomes under $25,000 account for 30 per cent of all cosmetic surgery patients. Americans spend more each year on beauty than they do on education.

As our role models become ever younger and more idealised, we are so afraid of aging that the quest for youthful preservation generates an almost pathological obsession with our bodies. As we align our sense of self-worth with self-image, the psychological and emotional consequences are tortuous. The one thing we do know for certain is that our body will always, in the end, betray us."

I agree with all that Zed Nelson said in his intro that went with his series 'Love Me'. This subject is something a lot of people are interested in and will carry on being as more and more people become obsessed with beauty. 

These are just a selection of some of his images from the series. As you can see all these show different kind of beauty issues people have and how everyone thinks different things look beautiful therefore no one can become perfect in the eyes of everyone. So some people are fighting a losing battle.