general

American photographer Lauren Greenfield's recent exhibition is entitled "Girl Culture". The artist's stunning documentary photographs are prompting comparisons to other female photographers such as Tina Barney and Nan Goldin.

Like Barney, also a documentarist of the social realms of contemporary America, Greenfield painstakingly monitors subtle variations of self-representation, made congruent with commonly accepted ideals at the earliest possible stage in a person's development. The rites Greenfield are watching are those of the common girl. In this way, "Girl Culture" presents the opposite of the body-hiding conventions of Barney's East Coast WASPs. Greenfield focuses on the procedures of preparing and presenting the body in a body-fixated mass culture.

"Girl Just Want to Have Fun" springs to mind as a disturbing euphemism for living the life of a little girl, an adolescent, or a grown woman in the United States today. Oscillating between overeating, starving, and self-mutilation, these girls become conditioned at an early age (even as young as four) by dressing up (and looking frighteningly grown-up) in a brutally competitive environment filled with drastic misconceptions of beauty.

The radical affirmation of the standardized ideal sometimes results in travesty, such as when we look through the photographer's eyes at both Las Vegas showgirls and minors wearing too much makeup. Greenfield knows her craft. Her eye is never hurtful or brutally revealing, but instead allows her subjects to present themselves the way they like, the way they live - knowing that the production of the self in front of the camera can be more revealing than any pose the photographer suggests.

Beauty, for most of these girls and women, is used as a weapon. It seems to grant self-esteem and acceptance. The outer appearance supports and covers the self simultaneously until the individual is no longer indistinguishable from the masses, until it seems to blend in smoothly. The American body is a body for the masses that results in mass display of the manipulated, operated, augmented body on such ritual occasions as pageants and spring breaks. Greenfield shows the way that these rituals conceal a rigid subtext of pain, suppression, and denial.

Remarkable is the sheer absence of men in all of these scenes. With the exception of a spring ritual, in which a group of men hold up a woman like a broken Barbie doll, they are almost invisible. They occupy the women's fantasies, their longings, their projections. Thus, they are included in every picture that Greenfield takes, with a girl culture unfolding in front of the backdrop of dominant male culture. In this respect, Greenfield's seemingly objective photography contains a tangiable, important critique. (Written by Magdalena Kroner)

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 its "girls gone wild" partying; while photographing Chattanooga, Tennessee, debutantes who complained about being fat as a size four; and while shooting the Edina teenagers, whose unforgiving social structure was described by one of their mothers as consisting of "tier-one, tier-two, and tier-three girls." Putting the book together, Greenfield says, was an intuitive process. "I made a lot of different pictures that seemed like pieces of the puzzle," she says, "but I didn't know until I was editing it whether they would all fit together." The puzzle included some surprising juxtapositions, tying together the worlds of girls and adult women. "When I looked at the exhibitionism of strippers, it reminded me of little girls and how they perform, how they look for approval," the photographer says. "In pictures, you can't help seeing the similarities in dress and body language."
The work was also cathartic. Greenfield was once, after all, a little girl who grew into a woman in the American body culture, and she recounts her own teenage years of chronic dieting, anxiety about her own popularity, and a conviction that her outer appearance reflected the imperfections that lurked on the inside. In this Greenfield has plenty of company. One eating-disorder clinic estimates that 85 percent of adult females wake up each morning dissatisfied with their weight and appearance, determined to somehow replicate the ever-shrinking dimensions of "lollipop" actresses and models (so called because their heads look oversized atop their sticklike frames). Joan Jacobs Brumberg, a historian at Cornell University, who wrote the introduction to Greenfield's book, feels that the current cultural environment, fueled by commercial forces outside the family and community, is actually toxic for adolescent girls "because of the anxieties it generates about the developing female body and sexuality."
One bright spot in this dispiriting landscape of insecurity and self-blame is the rise of girls' athletics, which is credited with giving at least some girls a body identity that arises from their abilities rather than their decorativeness. Greenfield says that the athletes she photographed-including tennis star Venus Williams, members of the Stanford University women's swim team, and players on the Little Indians softball team in Naples, Florida, where girls' softball is a local tradition-had a sense of a goal broader than themselves. "They have a larger and more important context in which to see themselves," she says, "that has to do with making a faster time, or coming through for their team, rather than simply looking good when they walk out the door."
The book also features Greenfield's bracingly honest interviews with some of the girls she photographed, such as Stephanie, 14, whom the photographer met at the weight-loss camp, and Sheena, a 15-year-old struggling with her body image (see page 56). "I think it's a challenging culture for girls to grow up in," Greenfield admits. "My role isn't to condemn it, but to try to show the pieces, to put them together. This book is a subjective view of one aspect of the girl culture. It's not the whole story, but it's the part of the story that leaves no one untouched."

The photographs taken in this book were wonderful and fun, but the only reason why I gave it a 4 was because it didn't have much variety [and, to be honest, was a bit cliché]. However, I did find the book very interesting and the stories for each photo made it twice as good. I definitely would recommend it.