"Beauty is a $160 billion-a-year global industry. The worldwide pursuit of body improvement has become a new religion.
We live in a society that celebrates and iconises youth, where the old, the aesthetically average and the fat seem to have been erased from the pages of our glossy magazines, advertising posters and television screens.
The promise of bodily improvement is fuelled by advertising campaigns and a commercially-driven Western media, reflecting an increasingly narrow palette of beauty. The modern Caucasian beauty ideal has been packaged and exported globally, and just as surgical operations to 'Westernise' oriental eyes have become increasingly popular, so the beauty standard has become increasingly prescriptive. 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 grace 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." (Zed Nelson)
After my tutorial with Matthew, he showed me the work of Zed Nelson and how he uses text to collate a series together and link them. Zed looks into the beauty industry, and explores cosmetic surgery, beauty pagents for the young as well as the old, and how people react to the term beauty. Although the series does not flow as a series if just looked at in a gallery, the text that accompanies the images draws them together as a narrative and makes the viewer understand them as a collective.
In relation to my work, I planned to have the name or contents of the collection as the title, and the work of Zed Nelson has shown me that this is possible, and text can really bring together the exhibition.
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