Zed Nelson shows out our obsession with youth and beauty

The exhibition "Love Me" by Zed Nelson will be open from 14th may to 31st august at Palau Robert.

The photographer Zed Nelson presents a collection of images that describe our obsession with youth and beauty in the exhibition “Love Me”, which is open to the public from 14 May to 31 August on the first floor of the Palau Robert. The show is one of the more than 45 that can be seen in various venues around Barcelona as part of the Barcelona DOCfield>14 Festival of Documentary Photography.

In the 25 images on display, “Love Me” explores the western ideal of beauty and the way this cult of the body has been exported around the world. It also analyses the power of the global beauty industry, which today is worth $160 billion a year, and our collective insecurity, vanity and fear of ageing.

Zed Nelson is known for his perseverance, meticulousness and professionalism in his work. Over a period of five years, he has visited 18 countries across five continents to take the shots included in this exhibition and which also appear in the book “Love Me” (published by Contrasto).

In “Love Me” we meet plastic surgeons, anorexics, child beauty queens, bodybuilders, trainee models, housewives, porn stars and businesspeople. We also see an annual beauty competition held in a South-American women’s prison, North-American soldiers who get free breast implants, and the long list of nose operations done in Teheran (Iran). Also featured are student plastic surgeons doing face lifts on severed human heads taken from bodies donated to science, women workers at a nuclear power station in Russia competing for the title of “Miss Atom”, and a millionaire plastic surgeon from Brazil who offers free plastic surgery operations to people with no money.