Zed Nelson

All images © Zed Nelson

It was great to finally meet Zed Nelson the other week at The Ian Parry Awards and chat to him about his major five year project involving photography that he has undertaken in seventeen countries across five continents. Further to our conversation he kindly sent me over some images and related information. The new work, titled Love Me, reflects on the cultural and commercial forces that drive a global obsession with youth and beauty. The project explores how a new form of globalization is taking place, where an increasingly narrow Western beauty ideal is being exported around the world like a crude universal brand.

The work will be published as a book at the beginning of October by Contrasto. A number of images from the new series were exhibited in the Tate Britain show, How We Are – Photographing Britain, and also at Flowers East and the ICA gallery, London. A touring solo exhibition is now being planned. Here is the introductory text to the project:

"Love Me explores the insidious power of the global beauty industry and our collective insecurity, vanity and fear of ageing. In a series of compelling images, Love Me negotiates the boundaries of art and documentary, reflecting a world we have created in which there are enormous social, psychological and economic rewards and penalties attached to the way we look. Over a period of five years Nelson visited seventeen countries across five continents, meeting cosmetic surgeons, anorexics, beauty queens, bodybuilders, trainee models, housewives, porn stars, businessmen and soldiers. Whilst Nelson’s subjects appear willing participants in an omnipresent culture of bodily improvement, they are also hapless victims – at the mercy of larger social forces and locked into their insatiable craving for approval.

As the subjects´ frailties and pretensions are exposed, so too are we the viewer: our motives for looking, for inspecting, along with uncomfortable reminders of our own vanities and insecurities. In Love Me, Zed Nelson has produced a powerful body of work that forces every one of us to question our own place in a culture that compels us to constantly judge, and be judged, by our appearance."

Having gained international recognition and numerous awards during a decade spent as a documentary photographer working in some of the harshest and most lawless areas of the world, Nelson’s recent work embraces a more considered, conceptual approach to reflect on contemporary social issues.

Through acute social observation, Nelson’s work explores our weaknesses, fears, and desires, in images that manage to be at once both challenging and sympathetic. His seminal project Gun Nation - a disturbing reflection on America's deadly love affair with the gun – is one of Nelson’s best-known projects to date. Completed over three years, the work was awarded five major international photography prizes and published as a book.

Love Me is Zed Nelson’s second book. The work was recently short-listed for the Leica European Publishers Award for Photography. Nelson’s previous awards include the Visa d’Or at the International Festival of Photojournalism, France; First Prize in World Press Photo Competition; and the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award, USA. Nelson’s work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate Britain, and is in the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Nelson has had solo shows in London, Stockholm and New York.

Laura Pannack

I got chatting to a very talented young photographer by the name of Laura Pannack last week at Flowers East and discovered she was in fact the author of a body of work that I adore so much so I must share it with you all just in case you are not familiar with it. She is still at a very early stage in her career but given that she won the Next Perspective Hotshoe Award and assisted the likes of Simon Roberts for 2 years during university, she has come quite far in a short space of time. Here are a few images and artist statement from her beautiful project the untitled:























All images ©Laura Pannack

"Shut out from the teenage world the majority of us struggle to comprehend the behaviour of some adolescents. Through a lack of understanding ,which breeds fear,we tend to stereotype young people. However, these judgements are fuel for rebellion, intensifying the search for attention,identity and belonging.

The invincible yet vulnerable nature of teenagers has inspired me to embark on photographic adventures, sharing their company and releasing their undefined identity through the art of picture making.

I have intentionally chosen not to title my project as I did not want to label or define any of my subjects. Likewise, I have left it unclear whether my subjects are young offenders on probation, pupils with special needs, private school attendants or other young people I have encountered. The images are simply titled with the true forename of each young person, giving the viewer a hint as to their identity without attaching stigma – and emphasising the fact that each of my subjects is unique.

Adolescence is a universal experience and by considering these images we can begin to reflect and connect with the subject. Young people are a constant reminder of our existence, our past and our identity. Just as we wonder for them, we also review who we have grown up to become.

With the prevalence of negative images of young people in the media, it is time to celebrate British youth with their infinite diversities and see them as individuals with a huge potential of talent and skills they can offer to our country. We need to challenge those images which only serve to give our youth a sense of low worth resulting in a perpetuating cycle of problems, low image, crime, bad press, low self esteem and more crime. Constructing stereotypes and transcribing blame is preventing the next generation from being inspired to achieve and develop self-confidence. I hope through my imagery to challenge these perceptions."

Nadav Kander

Head over to Nadav Kander´s site for some real treats but before you do here are a few images from his Yangtze, From East to West project to whet your whistle.




















All images ©Nadav Kander

To best appreciate this work one really needs to see the images anywhere but on a computer screen to be honest. I recently had the opportunity to view them when they were on display at what is probably my favourite gallery for checking out contemporary photography in London, Flowers East. In fact, I´ll be there this Friday for the Edward Burtynsky opening so come along and say hello if you are out Hoxton way.

Take the time to sit back and read his artist statement for a fuller flavour of the work. Here it is:

"The Yangtze River, which forms the premise to this body of work, is the main artery that flows 4100miles across china, travelling from its furthest westerly point in Qinghai Province to Shanghai in the east. The river is embedded in the consciousness of the Chinese, even those who live thousands of miles from the river. It plays a pivotal role in both the spiritual and physical life of the people. More people live along its banks than live in the USA – one in every eighteen people on the planet.

Using the river as a metaphor for constant change, I have photographed the landscape and people along its banks from mouth to source. Importantly for me I worked intuitively, trying not to be influenced by what I already knew about the country. After several trips to different parts of the river, it became clear that what I was personally responding to, and how I felt whilst being in china, was permeating my pictures; a formalness and unease, a country that feels both at the beginning of a new era and at odds with itself. China is a nation that appears to be severing its roots by destroying its past by moving forward at such an astounding and unnatural pace. I felt a complete outsider and explained this pictorially by ‘stepping back’ and showing humans as small in their surroundings. Common man has little say in China’s progression, and this smallness of the individual is alluded to in the work.

I feel that there are strong parallels in China with the 20th Century immigrants who poured off the boats onto American soil, a new beginning without roots. Millions of domestic migrant workers are travelling from rural areas to the cities. This condition manifests itself throughout China’s social fabric and echoed my own feelings of dislocation. Further layers have been added to certain images by compositing single figures into a scene, twice removed from their natural habitat. Rather than looking to the future with hope, the photographic migrants appear in limbo, unable to observe their past at a time of uncertain future.

Although it was never my intention to make documentary pictures, the sociological context of this project is very important and ever present. The displacement of 3 million people in a 600km stretch of the River and the effect on humans when a country moves towards the future at pace are themes that will inevitably be present within the work.

A Chinese friend I made whilst working on the project reiterated what many Chinese people feel: ‘Why do we have to destroy to develop?’ He explained that in Britain, many of us can revisit where we were brought up and it will be much the same, it will remind us of our families and upbringing. In China that is virtually impossible. The scale of development has left most places unrecognisable; “Nothing is the same. We can’t revisit where we came from because it no longer exists.”

China is progressing rapidly, and the landscape – both economically and physically – is changing daily. These are photographs that can never be taken again."