Love Me: Photos of Bodies Altered to Fit a Globalized, Standardized Image of Beauty
In an interview with The New York Times, photographer Zed Nelson declares that "the worldwide pursuit of body improvement has become like a new religion."
A religion, that is, that transcends previous religious, cultural, ethnic, social and economic boundaries. Nelson's photographs, which zigzag between Senegal and Iran, Russia and Texas, China and South Africa, show how much the definition of beauty has become globalized and standardized, and emphasize just how important that one standard of beauty has become to societies around the globe.
"Love me", his book about the havoc the global beauty industry is wreaking on bodies and psyches, is the result of travels across five continents photographing the "hapless victims" with an "insatiable craving for approval" who have fallen prey to the overwhelming pressure to conform to a particular standard of beauty.
This is a standard that places a premium on being white, tall, thin, and young, with no distinguishing "ethnic" features; a standard you could just as easily find exalted on a poster in rural Africa or a billboard in front of the Kremlin. His photos depict young Iranian girls recovering from nose jobs, older American women with the frighteningly tightened faces of so many plastic surgeries, Chinese leg lengthening operations, and tanned, buff Brazilian plastic surgeons, among many other characters and scenes encountered on the singular quest for globalized beauty.
As Nadia Sussman points out in The New York Times' interview with Zed Nelson, one of the ironies of the photos from "Love Me" is that they depict people struggling so hard to conform to a certain idea of beauty and to gain acceptance from it, and at the same time they show how frightening, bizarre, and off-putting these struggles for acceptance are.
Even if you perhaps subscribed to the notion beforehand, after looking at these photos it would be hard to think that the cross-cultural obsession with thin, white, young conformity is a positive thing. All that surgery, dieting, and general, constant stressing about appearance and conformity is narrowing us into the flattened, Photoshopped images on the covers of glossy magazines, burying our racial, ethnic, cultural and individual identities, and screwing over our health and self-esteem in the process.
Photo credit: Madelineyoki
Sarah Menkedick
is a freelance writer currently based in Oaxaca, Mexico. She has spent the last five years teaching, writing and traveling on five continents. She regularly writes about women's rights.
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