Zed Nelson: Love Me
An exploration of the global beauty industry across five continents
Award-winning photographer Zed Nelson 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 eighteen countries across five continents, photographing cosmetic surgeons, beauty queens and bodybuilders alongside everyday teenagers, housewives and businessmen. In this extensive cross-cultural investigation, we see an annual prison beauty contest in a South American penitentiary, Iranians queuing for nose jobs in Tehran and female staff at a Russian nuclear agency competing for the title of‘Miss Atom’.
The project explores a new form of globalisation, where an increasingly narrow Western beauty ideal is being exported around the world like a crude universal brand. Whilst Nelson’s subjects appear willing participants in an omnipresent culture of bodily improvement, they might equally be considered hapless victims – at the mercy of larger social forces and locked into an insatiable craving for approval. As the subject’s frailties and pretensions are exposed, so too are we the viewer: our motives for looking, for inspecting, along with uncomfortable reminders of our own vanities and insecurities.
Zed Nelson’s previous awards include the Visa d’Or at the International Festival of Photojournalism, France; first prize in the World Press Photo Competition and the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award, USA.
The publication LOVE ME (Contrasto publishing), was recently shortlisted for the Leica European Publishers Award for Photography and awarded First Prize in the 2010 Pictures of the Year International Competition (USA).
LOVE ME is an Impressions Gallery Touring Exhibition and has been developed through a partnership between Impressions Gallery and Ffotogallery, the national development agency for photography and lens-based media in Wales.
Artists
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Zed Nelson
Zed Nelson (born Uganda, 1968) gained international recognition during a decade spent as a documentary photographer working in some of the most troubled areas of the world. His seminal project Gun Nation was exhibited worldwide, awarded five major international photography prizes and published as a book. Previous awards include the Visa d’Or at the International Festival of Photojournalism, France, 1998; first prize in the World Press Photo Competition, 1997, and the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award, USA, 1999.
Our visitors say...
“Thank you for presenting such a poignant set of images in a way that challenged me without trying to sell me moral perspective.”
“A sobering and often shocking exhibition, but very necessary.”
“You have put my thoughts into pictures about western society and globalisation.”
Artist Talk with Zed Nelson
1hr 1 minute
Recorded 16 April 2011 at Impressions Gallery, Bradford.
