Globalisation

Zed Nelson - Love Me - Billboard, Rio, Brazil 

Zed Nelson's Love Me series approaches the subject of globalisation extremely effectively, he explores the vast different countries and how they approach beauty in their life. 

On this particular image he has taken a picture of a billboard sign, an advertisement for a cosmetic brand. It is a huge image that has been placed on a very large tall building to attract passers by to buy the product. 

The series shows the varied ways of how beauty effected individuals around the world. He talks about South African women who are driven by caucasian beauty that have operations to make them look barbie doll like. I agree that the world is driven by western media and commercials promoting a narrow idea of beauty. 

Nelson is worried about how out of hand it could get, how it could affect the social world around us, how it could affect individuals finding it hard to find a job because of how attractive they are? 

'We have created a world in which there are enormous social, psychological and economic rewards and penalties attached to the way we look' - Zed Nelson.

Repetition

Ed Ruscha - Twenty six Gasoline Stations

Ed Ruscha has made a book about documenting these 26 gas stations. He took a journey from where he lived at the moment in LA to where he first grew up in Texas. This is an interesting way to show a personal journey through documenting each gasoline he comes across. I really like how each image is completely different to the next but still has this repetition element to the work. This has been produced into a book which is sequenced in order of the journey. 
"Ruscha's books combined the literalness of early California pop art with a flat-footed photographic aesthetic informed by minimalist notions of repetitive sequence and seriality....Thirty years later, with a quarter of a century of mainstream artworld activity between, the aspect of shock-effect and humor has diminished somewhat. But in 1962 (sic) this work read against the photographic landscape of highly aestheticized image-making." Joanna Drucker^[9]

The Rhetoric of Images

Andy Warhol - Marilyn


One of the most iconic images from Andy Warhol. He has created this image of Marilyn Manroe and repeated it by printing it differently in each squared image. He hasn't just done one use of this image, he has used it throughout his years as an artist. 
He has took an image of a vey famous and respected actress and screen printed her face in so many different ways. Warhol is really interested in celebrities and death combined and I believe that this was his main inspiration for this whole body of work. Looking at these images like this doesn't make me feel any emotion, I just take them for what they are, beautiful pieces of art. I like how he has created these images from one simple portrait of Marilyn and then turning it into so many different interpretations of the image.