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Created and Maintained by: The Photoimaging Information Council |
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| July 20, 2008 | |||
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Lauren Greenfield lives in Venice, California in the heart of the ‘valley girl’ culture, which she has documented in ground-breaking books and exhibitions that explore commercialism, loss of innocence and the obsessive with physical beauty. Three of her books, Fast Forward, Girl Culture and Thin are also in development as feature-length films. She lives with her husband, Frank Evers, who is Managing Director of VII, and their two young children, one of whom was nestled quietly in her arms as we conducted our interview.  © Clay Enos
TGP: Let’s start by talking about your most celebrated project-- Girl Culture. Years after publication, the book is still out there stirring strong reactions. Did you have a point of view going in? Greenfield: I had ideas but I started Girl Culture with open mind, just wanting to investigate the subject. After five years of involvement, I’ve come out the other side as more of a feminist. Girl Culture is about the body project, about how girls make bodies into all encompassing projects, how the body has become the primary expression of identity for girls and women. The final work questions whether this is the kind of girl culture we want. It’s not overt because that’s not the place for documentary photography. But there is an element of subjectivity in the way the book and the exhibition are sequenced. That subjectivity could be called political but not in terms of left and right. Girl Culture has been embraced by very conservative communities such as South Bend and Davenport. The Girl Scouts have gotten involved. When the Junior League bought the show to Minneapolis, the mayor declared ‘Girl Culture Week.’ The work has been embraced by right-wing and more conservative people as well as feminists, students and artists. It’s very rewarding. When the show travels, I usually lecture and do community work. Museums offer outreach programming such as professors lecturing about eating disorders and self-esteem issues. There have been mother-daughter teas, and body-image projects getting kids to photograph their own girl culture. It’s amazing to see the way people make it their own. I love looking at guest books in museums where people write passages addressed to me about how the work affected them. It’s mind-blowing. When you’re out there in the field making pictures, you never think they’ll touch a nerve like that.  Cover, Girl Culture © Lauren Greenfield / VII
TGP: So what do you do next after touching a nerve like that? Greenfield: I’m working on a book and film called Thin about women at a clinic for eating disorders. Girl Culture was about the body project, and eating disorders are sort of this mental illness out at the far end of continuum, the most exaggerated and pathological form of the body project. The book will be published this fall at the same time as an HBO film. It will be my first feature-length documentary, and HBO has given me the opportunity to direct. The movie premiers at Sundance this fall. The approach of the film is similar to my photography-- documentary, cinema verite, life unfolding in front of the camera in an intimate emotional way over a long period of time. I’ve been going to this clinic since 1997, so they let me shoot in very intense situations, such as family and group therapy sessions or in the bathroom when someone is relapsing and purging. It’s been an intense emotional journey. TGP: How did the contact with HBO come about? Greenfield: After Girl Culture came out in 2002, I an approached HBO about doing series of documentary films on the subject. My photography is very narrative, and I thought I could take the narrative to the next step by approaching it in film. HBO didn’t want to do a series but they liked the idea of one film on eating disorders. They gave me the chance to direct and it’s been a great experience. HBO is very artist-centered. They’ve given me a lot of independence. I loved rhythm and the creative challenge of working in team and thinking about the narrative unfolding over time. When we finished cutting last summer, I felt like there was something I still wanted to tell and decided to do a companion book for the film. The book ended up more elaborate than I thought with new photos and new trips to the clinic. I also incorporated the journals of four women featured in the film. Now I’m doing a museum exhibition. Working together, the exhibition, the film and the book will communicate the whole project.
Lily, 5, shops at Rachel London 's Garden, where Britney Spears has some of her clothes designed, Los Angeles, California. © Lauren Greenfield / VII TGP: How did you get involved in VII and what attracted you to the idea? Greenfield: About six months after VII started, Jim Nachtwey told me that a group of friends had launched a different kind of agency. I had been with Sygma but left when they were bought by Corbis. So I was on my own and I liked my independence. But I was also interested in having a community of colleagues. I liked the idea of being part of an agency owned by the members, where each photographer is almost a mini-agency, doing their own editorial, their own edits, their own captions, scanning, color… My stories always have a subjective element, and I felt that if I wasn’t doing the editing and sequencing or at least talking directly to the magazines, a lot would get lost. I also liked the idea of using technology to have an all-virtual agency where we don’t have to make dupes or send slides or store our originals in agency file cabinets. We can live all over world and have a small office group with a small overhead that we can afford. We went in the opposite direction from Corbis by creating a smaller structure that gives us more human contact in distributing stories and more control over content.  Hannah does Alli's make-up as the girls get ready for their first big party. © Lauren Greenfield / VII
TGP: Speaking of content, it seems that your subject matter is very different from that of others in VII? Where do you see the similarities? Greenfield: It’s true that I seem like the odd man out or the odd woman out in an agency of mostly war photographers. They did a group book and show called War, and the agency was born out of 9/11, and when you look at the stories on the website, mine do stand out. The thing that brings us together is people’s commitment to long-term, personally and socially engaged documentary projects. We’re all engaged photographers. There are no jobbers among us. My projects may be domestic or U.S.-oriented while someone else works more abroad. But now that Eugene Richards has joined, my work is not so different. Antonin is working on similar kinds of projects. Even the war photographers are doing other kinds of work. We’re all engaged in the issues of the day but in my case the engagement is anthropological as well as journalistic.  The 7th grade popular clique in the cafeteria of South View Middle School, Edina, MN. © Lauren Greenfield / VII
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