Girl Culture

by Lauren Greenfield

Book Overview

Renowned photographer Lauren Greenfield has won acclaim and awards for her studies of youth culture. In 'Girl Culture', she combines a photojournalists sense of story with fine-art composition and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811837904
• ISBN13: 9780811837903
• Release Date: September 2002
• Publisher: Chronicle Books (CA)
• Length: 155 Pages
• Weight: 2.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 12.2" x 10.4"

Customer Reviews

Every picture tells a story...

Of course, it is a cliche that every picture tells a story and a picture is worth a thousand word, but "Girl Culture" can't be described any other way. The pictures so well illustrate the struggles and concerns of today's teenage girl. The dramatic illustrations and accompanying stories prove just how hard it is to grow up female and maintain a sense of self and high self-esteem. Some of the pictures and stories will break your heart, others will inspire anger and disgust, but over all the emotions evoked by this book are powerful and motivating. This book is a must for understanding the lives of teenage girls.

ARTWEEK REVIEW - FEBRUARY 2003

Lauren Greenfield's photographs from her most recent project, Girl Culture,represents an important return to traditional photography and a break withthe popular, staged work of the past decade. Using a 35mm camera andworking intuitively and spontaneously, Greenfield returns to the basics -picturing that which is important and reorganizing the chaos of the realworld into compelling and complex images that speak to our experiences asemotional beings. This may sound simple, but over the past ten years,photographers have moved far from the traditional approach and into theimaginative fictions of Hollywood films, utilizing elaborate productionscrews and massive digital prints. Greenfield, in a powerful and compellingexhibition and book, brings photography back down to earth, and in doing so,signals a shift in contemporary picture making.Greenfield has spent more than five years photographing young women andgirls, plumbing the zeitgeist for clues about body image, self-esteem,consumerism and sexuality. As you can imagine, the results are not pretty.They are skewed toward the complicated psychological arena whereself-awareness is mixed with victimization. The exhibition and book arequite different experiences due to the fact that the publication includedinterviews with the subjects. For a full appreciation of how vital thiswork is to photography and to women¹s studies, it is important to see themboth. I found a pervasive sadness to the interviews, wherein women spoke ofthe pressures to be thin, stylish and sexual and then expressed admirationfor these ideals, like an alcoholic who continues drinking, encouragingothers to join in.The exhibition at Stephen Cohen Gallery is immediately remarkable due to theintimate scale of the photographs. The prints range from 11 by 14 inches to16 by 20 inches with only a few being larger. This changes the experienceof the work by drawing the viewers in close to read and interpret theimages. Besides the modest print size, when we get close to thephotographs, we can see the tiny specks of grain and notice that some ofthem are a bit out of focus. This may seem sound like a criticism, butthese imperfections are a refreshing departure from the majority ofcontemporary photography, suggesting the haphazard complexity of real lifeand the medium¹s dependence on the artist¹s unique vision.Greenfield¹s photographs are well known from major magazines and oftendisplay a biting criticism and acerbic wit. These characteristics are usedmercilessly in some of the images. Lillian, then 18, shops at Kirna Zabete,New York shows the pretty blonde sitting in an upscale boutique, holding ared shoe. Her mouth hangs open in mid-sentence and its red-lined, ovalshape is echoed in the red, open-toed, ankle-strapped slingback she isholding. Lillian reeks of having too much money and too little taste, andthe photograph is an indictment of her shallowness and vanity. In theinterview, Lillian says she hates being a blonde but claims to

American Photo Review Jan/Feb 2003

They are always blond, it seems, and always thin: the Popular Girls of every woman's haunted teenage memories. They are named Monique or Sandy or, of course, Heather, and their lithe legs stretch a mile from their fashionably rolled-up shorts to their totally cool sneakers - a degree of stylistic perfection unattainable by mere mortals. They seem so preternaturally gifted that you wonder whether such grace can persist into adulthood. (Maybe you hope it doesn't.) You also wonder whether these girls are happy.Lauren Greenfield wondered just that when she traveled to Edina, Minnesota, in 1998 to photograph a story for The New York Times Magazine on the expansive topic of "being 13." Her pictures of the glorious blond Alpha Girls ruling over the seventh grade there began to provide an answer. The photos also began to convince Greenfield that there was much to be revealed about the real lives of American girls. It all led to a new book, Girl Culture (Chronicle Books, $40), an ambitious effort that blurs the distinction between photojournalism, art, and social science. (An accompanying exhibition of the images opened in October at the Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York and will be traveling to the Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles in December and the Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco in January.) "What I learned shooting the 'popular girls' in Edina was how hard it was to stay on top," says Greenfield, "and how insecure they felt about their social position. One said she was afraid she would come to school one day and suddenly find that she wasn't in the popular group anymore. Another girl said that if she could do it over again, she'd rather have real friends who liked her for who she was." Instead, she was rewarded for who she appeared to be.That raw truth - the tyranny of appearance in the lives of young girls and women-lies at the center of Greenfield's book. The girls in Girl Culture range from four-year-olds playing dress-up in spangly princess outfits to awkward teenagers arriving at a weight-loss summer camp to Las Vegas showgirls and strippers plying their trade. In one way or another, all of them are defined by how they look. Like the photographs in Greenfield's first book, 1997's acclaimed Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood, the images in Girl Culture are often weighty with unflinching detail. In one shot, a showgirl named Anne-Margaret is seen reflected in her dressing-room mirror at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas. Taped to the side of the mirror is a handwritten note that reads I APPROVE OF MYSELF alongside pictures of models the dancer admires. That picture, shot on assignment for Stern magazine, got Greenfield thinking "about how girls construct their identities, how they use pieces of the outside world to express themselves."Soon, Greenfield, who recently became a member of the VII photo agency, began seeing aspects of girl culture all around her: on an assignment in Florida shooting a story on spring break, with i

An Unflinching Look at the Cauldron that Forges Women

With a lens that doesn't shy away from the 4 year old in a mini sequined gown, the cheesy backstage of a Las Vegas strip club, a surgical suite during a breast augmentation, or Panama Beach, FL at spring break, Lauren Greenfield's wide ranging photoessay provides an honest insider's view of the culture that forges women in the U.S. today. Anyone raising girls, anyone who was a girl, and anyone interested in trying to understand women, should have this book! What a magnificent find!