Zed Nelson - LOVE ME

About

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 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 industry competing for the title of ‘Miss Atom'. Whilst Nelson's subjects appear willing participants in an omnipresent culture of bodily improvement, he feels they are also 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.