Lauren Greenfield

If you spend more than a few minutes chatting with rising photography star, Lauren Greenfield, it’s becomes clear that she is the quintessential California woman. Spend a few more minutes with her, and it also becomes clear that Greenfield is exceptionally well-qualified for her de facto role as the translator and custodian of youth culture in America today. With two enormously successful youth projects to her credit, Fast Forward and Girl Culture, Greenfield reveals the life and times of the pre-voting-age crowd in ways that parents only wish they could.

Beginning with an alternative elementary school and high school that emphasized the arts, Greenfield gained a solid grounding in the arts and social sciences early on. By the time she was graduated from High School, her credits included an award from the Jewish Historical Society and from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts for a photography project on the hands of Jewish women who frequented Venice beach.

But at Harvard, Greenfield wasn’t headed toward a photography career. Instead, she gravitated toward documentary film and Social Studies concentrations. Eventually, two things changed her mind. First, she realized that her documentary work as a photographer was the most relevant to her abiding interest in and theoretical work in documenting culture. And, second, an internship with National Geographic, a publication in which pictures are the story, made her realize that photographers can, in fact, be the real story tellers.

“That was a revelation to me and also very exciting. That was where I decided that I wanted to be a photographer,” Greenfield says today.

Later, a National Geographic assignment to cover Mayan culture became another turning point. The assignment, particularly the technical hurdles and access issues, proved difficult for a young photographer. “I was able to document what I saw,” Greenfield says, “but I was not able to dig deep and interpret what I was seeing.”

“That experience made me want to go back to my own culture where I felt like I could start at a much more advanced place,” she recalls. “If that was my starting point, I believed that I could take it to a different level. I decided that when I moved back to L.A. I would start photographing in my high school.”

True to her goal, Greenfield began a personal project to document youth culture on her home ground. Then, in 1993, Greenfield received the first photographic documentary grant sponsored by National Geographic – for a project about Los Angeles youth. The work led to Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood, a best-selling photography book (hardcover Knopf, 1997; paperback Chronicle Books, 2004) that received the Community Awareness Award from the National Press Photographers' "Pictures of the Year" competition. Excerpts from the book appeared in more than 50 major national and international publications and on Good Morning America, CNN, NPR, and the McNeill Lehrer Report. Museums and festivals also featured her work.

Recalling the project, Greenfield says that it eventually came to focus on the early loss of innocence in a media-saturated society. “As I started to photograph kids from different socio-economic backgrounds, the work became about the homogenization of youth culture and how kids from very different backgrounds were being similarly affected by media culture. I had no idea where the project would end up when I began or what the pictures would say until the final editing at the end of a three-year process of discovery.”

As her notoriety increased, so did Greenfield’s prestige and the demand for her to work on editorial assignments. Today her photographs have been published widely in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Elle, Harper's, Time, Life, National Geographic, Stern, American Photo, and the London Sunday Times Magazine. She is also a member of the prestigious Agency VII <www.viiphoto.com/>, a collective that offers documentary photographs ranging from political and social to environmental conflict.

Go-go dancers perform for Cindy, 41 (left) and Rachel, 33 at West Hollywood\'s club, The Factory. Friday is Girl Bar; upon entering the bouncer warns men in line that inside women dance with women. © 2005 Lauren Greenfield / VII Photo Agency

Regardless of the accolades and prestigious assignments, Greenfield’s camera still focuses on all things cultural, and especially on youth. Her second acclaimed work, Girl Culture, was a five-year project that culminated in a book and a variety of museum shows and partnerships. The book, published in 2002, is in its third printing. And drawing on her experiences with Fast Forward, Greenfield broadened the reach of Girl Culture.

“From my experience with Fast Forward, I saw that museums are the places where the public sees your work. In the case of young people, they don’t buy a $40 coffee table book. With the first book, young people didn’t buy the book and they didn’t read New York Times magazine or People magazine where it was excerpted. But they did go into the museums, especially with school groups. Sometimes museums did special programming that was really effective with young people,” Greenfield says.

For Girl Culture, Greenfield partnered with the Center for Creative Photography in Arizona to build a museum show that began in 2002. “With them, we built an educational curriculum that is online and free, so students, educators, and parents can use it as a resource without having to buy the book or seeing the museum show. That really opened up the audience,” Greenfield adds. The show will tour through 2006, with openings February 10th, 2005 at Tufts in Boston and January 15th - March 27th, 2005 in Minneapolis.

Two shows are also in the offing: Girl Culture One—at the Minnesota Center of Photography in February where mayor, who really liked Greenfield’s work and identified with it because he has a 13-year old daughter, is declaring it Girl Culture Week during the week of the show. In addition, another show is scheduled at the Museum at Tufts University in Boston.

Most recently, Greenfield directed a HBO documentary about eating disorders. “It is my first documentary,” she says, “and it’s been really exciting.” Shooting began in June 2004 and continued for nine weeks in the field. Now in the editing phase, Greenfield says the film should air in 2006.

Greenfield says that she doesn’t know if she will do more film projects. “I love photography and the film thing takes an enormous amount of time,” she explains. “I feel like [film is] another tool: If I come across another subject that I feel can be better told in film than photography, I might be interested in that. But I am definitely not trying to make a switch.”