Pictures of the week: A New Kind Of Beauty, by Phillip Toledano

These are not 'my plastic surgery hell' stories lifted from the pages of the Daily Mail. These are individuals who have transformed the way they look through radical reconstructive surgery to the point where they still look human, only a little less so.→ Photograph: Phillip Toledano

By photographing them in a flattering, highly stylised way – with a nod to the 16th-century portraitist Hans Holbein the Younger – Phillip Toledano subtly reinforces this notion. With their static postures, his subjects appear detached, their expressions frozen as much by the art direction as by their surgery.→ Photograph: Phillip Toledano

Toledano’s interest in radical surgery followed a series of moving portraits he shot of his elderly father (dayswithmyfather.com) and of a man he shot who had undergone a lot of surgery. 'I’d been thinking about death and ageing while photographing Dad,' he says, 'and what struck me about this man was how, through his surgery, he was trying to defy the ageing process. He was mesmerising.'→ Photograph: Phillip Toledano

Through word of mouth and social media, Toledano tracked down others who had undergone extensive plastic surgery, and the project grew.→ Photograph: Phillip Toledano

If Toledano is trying to make a point, it is that we consider where we’re heading as a species. 'I wanted to ask what we might look like in 50 or 100 years. Will plastic surgery become as normal as wearing makeup or having a tattoo is today?'→ Photograph: Phillip Toledano

'For many people, these portraits are hard to look at. But the subjects have created their own idea of beauty, and that’s courageous. They are all happy with, and proud of, the way they look.'→ Photograph: Phillip Toledano

With the means radically to alter the way we look now freely available to us, it’s interesting, Toledano says, to examine how people choose to look. As the government considers tougher controls on plastic surgery, following Sir Bruce Keogh’s report on the dangers of the 'normalisation' of such procedures, that choice may become harder.

A New Kind of Beauty by Phillip Toledano is available on Amazon Photograph: Phillip Toledano