Lauren Greenfield
Lauren Greenfield (born 1966) is an American artist, documentary photographer, and documentary filmmaker. She has published four photographic monographs, directed four documentary features, produced four traveling exhibitions, and published in magazines throughout the world.[1]
Lauren Greenfield
Early life and education[edit]
Greenfield was born on June 28, 1966,[2] in Boston, Massachusetts, to psychologist Patricia Marks Greenfield and physician Sheldon Greenfield. She has a younger brother, film producer Matthew Greenfield. She attended Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences in Santa Monica.[3]
Greenfield graduated from Harvard University in 1987 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in visual and environmental studies. While an undergraduate, she studied overseas in several countries with the International Honors Program, a division of SIT Study Abroad. Her senior thesis photography project on the French aristocracy was called "Survivors of the French Revolution".[4]
Career[edit]
Photography[edit]
Greenfield's undergraduate thesis helped kick start her career as an intern for National Geographic Magazine. A subsequent grant from National Geographic provided financial support toward her debut monograph, "Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood" (Knopf 1997).[5] Five years after the release of "Fast Forward", Greenfield produced a second major body of work about the self-esteem crisis amongst American women, entitled "Girl Culture".[6]
Collections[edit]
Her photography, including entire bodies of work like Fast Forward, Girl Culture, "Thin", and "Generation Wealth" is in many major collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago,[99] Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the International Center of Photography, the Center for Creative Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston,[100] the Harvard University Archive, the Smith College Museum of Art, the Clinton Library, and the French Ministry of Culture.[101]
Exhibitions[edit]
Alongside her books, Fast Forward, Girl Culture, "THIN", and "Generation Wealth" Greenfield produced four large-scale traveling exhibitions with the same names, which have been seen in museums and cultural institutions around the world.[102][103][104][105]
In concert with the publication of her debut monograph, Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood (Knopf 1997),[5] her first major show, Fast Forward had its US debut at the International Center for Photography (ICP) in 1997. The show was exhibited in France, the Netherlands, Italy, Russia and a number of cultural venues in North America.[106]
The success of her second monograph, Girl Culture (2002),[6] and the accompanying show helped to cement her worldwide reputation as a documentary photographer. The book was reprinted five times by Chronicle Books and the show was exhibited at more than 29 venues around the world (France, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and United States).[107]
Her third major exhibition, THIN, accompanied both a feature-length documentary film, Thin (HBO, 2006), and a published photographic book, Thin (2006).[108] The exhibition debuted at The Women's Museum in Dallas, Texas and continued to exhibit through 2010.[109]
In May 2011, Greenfield received the honor of being the only photographer to be chosen twice as a Featured Artist at The Annenberg Space for Photography, as part of its exhibition, "Beauty CULTure" (Los Angeles, 2011), as one of only four Featured Photographers.[110] Greenfield was also commissioned by The Annenberg Space for Photography to direct a 30-minute documentary film about the subject of the exhibition. The resultant film forms the centerpiece of the exhibition.[111] In 2011, the exhibition received the Lucie Award for Curator (Kohle Yohannan) / Exhibition of the Year.[112]
In 2010, a collection of her photography from Fast Forward and Girl Culture was featured in Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography Since the Sixties, a photographic exhibition at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, curated by Brett Abbott.[113] In October 2010, the exhibition received the Lucie Award for Curator (Brett Abbott) / Exhibition of the Year.[114] In 2016 the International Center of Photography honored Greenfield with a Spotlight Award for her "extensive contributions to the visual storytelling world."[115]
Greenfield exhibited Generation Wealth by Lauren Greenfield at The Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles (2017).[116][117] This exhibit subsequently traveled to New York's ICP Museum (2018), Oslo's Nobel Peace Center Museum (2018), The Hague's Fotomuseum Den Haag (2018/19), Hamburg's Deichtorhallen,[118] the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen (2019/20), Fotografiska Museet Stockholm (2020), and the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow (2021).[119] According to the Annenberg Space for Photography website, this exhibition covers "the influence of affluence over the last 25 years, illustrating the globalization of materialism, celebrity culture and social status," and contains "195 color-saturated prints, 42 riveting first-person interviews and the accompanying multimedia projections and short films".[120][121] Writing about the Generation Wealth exhibit for Artforum, Naomi Fry noted, "[W]hat makes Greenfield’s photographs multilayered, sensitive, and fascinating—and carries them beyond a single-minded morality tale—is her understanding that people’s relationships with things in this lurid world are pleasurable and miserable both."[3]
Personal life[edit]
Greenfield is married to Frank Evers,[122] with whom she has two sons. They reside in Venice, California.[123] Her stepmother, Sherrie H. Kaplan, is a senior scientist at the New England Medical Center.
