Lauren Greenfield

I looked at her portfolio this morning. I had seen her work before. I specially remember Fast Forward. Four years shooting the youth of L.A. where she grew up. I found it provocative and thoughtful. These photographs illustrate how "You grow up really fast when you grow up in L.A. It seems like everyone is in a rush to be an adult. It's not cool to be a kid."

Her last work, Girl Culture is her personal journey as a photographer, as an observer of culture, as part of the media, as a media critic, as a woman, as a girl. "In this work, I have been drawn to the pathological in the everyday. I am interested in the tyranny of the popular and thin girls over the ones who don’t fit that mold. I am interested in the competition suffered by the popular girls, and their sense that being popular is not as satisfying as it appears. I am interested in the costly and time-consuming beauty rituals that are an integral part of daily life. I am interested in the fact that to fall outside the ideal body type is to be a modern-day pariah. I am interested in how girls’ feelings of frustration, anger, and sadness are expressed in physical and self-destructive ways: controlling their food intake, cutting their bodies, being sexually promiscuous. Most of all, I am interested in the element of performance and exhibitionism that seems to define the contemporary experience of being a girl."

Worth checking out if you haven't done so already.

Posted by Eider at September 30, 2003 09:27 PM