With trepidation I entered a nursing home recently. They are the invisible places that exist in our communities, but are not part of our everyday life. I was visiting an old family friend in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. I wanted to see her because she had been such an influence in my life that I felt she deserved the respect of a visit, even if she wasn’t aware of my presence. To say the experience was traumatic would be an understatement. Her once beautiful thick red hair was grey and her gnarled fingers constantly pulled at it, as she gazed vacantly around the room. I was expecting confusion, pain, a wasted body and everything that goes with old age and approaching death. What I wasn’t expecting was to see her tall distinguished and still handsome husband of fifty years cradling her face in his hands as he constantly told her how much he loved her and how beautiful she was. It made me ponder the nature of love and being loved, because, in spite of all the sophistication of modern life, the need to be loved is such an enormous quest for most of humanity. This quest is articulated through the London Based photographer, Zed Nelson and his exhibition, Love Me.
What a journey this show reveals as it portrays, the search for perfection, which feeds according to Nelson a $160 Billion-A-Year Global Industry. The range of images show the pursuit of perfection in the idealization of beauty from images of child beauty pageants, to grotesque and graphic images of a tummy tuck surgery. His work asks the question, ‘ in order to be loved, to be loveable, do we need smaller noses, bigger breasts, tighter skin, longer legs and remain forever youthful?’
When viewing the work, Ox and Angela, plastic surgeon and wife. Rio Brazil. , One is confronted with the shallowness of such a suggestion. A better question might be when does the human being that inhabits that body become worth loving or not worth loving. Nelson has spent 17 years photographing and examining the concept of body image and he comes to the conclusion that ‘if we align our sense of self –worth with self-image, the psychological and emotional consequences are tortuous.
When viewing the image of the good doctor and his wife (attached) a few questions come to mind; will he still love her in fifty years’ time when her mind or body has possibly broken down? - Is she an object or is she a person? Perhaps she should flee and leave him with the perfect little dogs.
http://www.visuramagazine.com/love-me-zed-nelson
Maggie - I would have liked more descriptions and analyses of the other works in the exhibition. Also I think your beginning paragraph is a bit too long and for some reason I feel like it is more suited to being a final paragraph.
ReplyDeleteFrom Athena