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Send this Speaker to a Friend - Copy and Paste Link http://www.wolfmanproductions.com/zed_nelson_loveme.html |
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Beauty is a $160 billion-a-year global industry. We live in a society that celebrates and worships youth. The promise of bodily improvement is fueled by advertising campaigns and a commercially-driven Western media, reflecting an increasingly narrow palette of beauty. In Africa, the use of skin-lightening and hair-straightening products is widespread. In South America, women have operations that bring them eerily close to the Barbie doll ideal and blonde-haired models appear on the covers of most magazines. Anorexia is on the increase in Japan, and in China, beauty pageants -- once banned as ‘spiritual pollution’ -- are now held across the country. But who creates this culture? |
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However much we may confidently point the finger at sinister commercial forces, 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. A recent scientific study reported that we make decisions about the attractiveness of people we meet in the space of 150 milliseconds. This superficial appraisal has profound implications. The body has, in a sense, become just another consumer purchase. 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 idealized, 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. |
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Over a period of five years, award-winning photojournalist, Zed Nelson, visited eighteen countries across five continents, meeting cosmetic surgeons, anorexics, beauty queens, bodybuilders, trainee models, housewives, businessmen and soldiers. In Love Me -- Nelson’s college and university lecture based on his book by the same name -- we witness inmates in a Brazilian penitentiary competing in a prison beauty contest, US army soldiers signing up for free breast implants and Iranians undergoing nose jobs. |
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Send this Speaker to a Friend - Copy and Paste Link Wolfman Productions |
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