Love Me by Zed Nelson is a project made over five years across five continents, examining the global beauty industry and its traffic in youth, desirability, and bodily transformation.
The series asks how a narrow largely Western ideal of beauty has been packaged and exported as a commercial promise. Across Tehran’s rhinoplasty queues, Chinese eyelid surgeries, Japanese anorexia, Brazilian prison beauty pageants, Texas child pageants, Las Vegas bodybuilding, Senegalese skin-lightening, and UK TV makeover culture, Love Me tracks how desire for acceptance is organized by markets and media. Moving from the war-zone flashpoints of Nelson’s earlier photojournalism toward a more conceptual inquiry, the project examines what happens when appearance becomes a form of social currency.
Visually, Love Me often uses centered portraits and carefully staged still lifes. Subjects appear in salons, clinics, bedrooms, operating rooms, pageants, and other spaces where appearance is measured, altered, or performed. The images are in color, with a polished finish that recalls fashion photography, lifestyle magazines, and advertising. At the same time, the controlled lighting and static framing produce a clinical mood, allowing viewers to study skin, bandages, surgical marks, cosmetics, trophies, wigs, implants, and other details with little distraction. The photographs move between ordinary rituals and more extreme transformations, making both part of the same visual field.
Rather than relying only on available-light reportage, Nelson used a portable studio approach, bringing artificial lighting, backdrops, and a formal working method. This method gives the pictures a polished surface while also exposing the procedures, objects, and vulnerabilities behind that surface. Still-life images of beauty and medical materials are photographed with the clarity of product advertising, suggesting how the body itself can become a marketable object.
The project was published as a monograph in 2009 and received significant recognition, including First Prize in Pictures of the Year International and a nomination for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Exhibited at venues including Impressions Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Cortona On The Move, the work reached audiences across both museum and festival contexts.
