More to Love

As mentioned in a previous blog, the First Place winner the Freelance/Agency Issue Reporting Picture Story category was a project entitled "Love Me." Somehow, I stumbled across Zed Nelson's larger essay in Issue 8 of Visura Magazine. The fuller project is even better.

Left caption: Jackeline Padilha, 22. Bikini wax. J. Sister’s waxing salon. New York, USA.
Right caption: “We live, as Naomi Wolf once observed, in a surgical age. Everybody’s doing it. Soon, the only people who won’t have any kind of cosmetic surgery will be the poor. Money will be the last barrier to the scalpel when allothers – gender, ideology, morals, politics – have gone.” Maureen Rice, writer. Ox and Angela, plastic surgeon and wife. Rio, Brazil.

 
Nelson's statement regarding the project:

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.

Left caption: “Men’s Health magazine (USA) hasn‘t had a hairy chest on it’s cover since 1995.” Wall Street Journal. Copacabana Beach. Rio, Brazil.
Right caption: “I’m competing with men 20 years younger than me.” Anthony Mascolo, 46. Liposuction to chin and abdomen. New Jersey, USA.