Lauren Greenfield's work is held in many museum collections and appears regularly in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, and Time. American Photo named her one of the 25 most influential photographers today. She lives in Venice, California.
Joan Jacobs Brumberg is a professor at Cornell University, where she has been teaching history, human development, and women's studies for over 20 years. She lives in Ithaca, New York.
'Thin' exposes chilling self-hatred
Photographs by Lauren Greenfield look at how external appearances
can clash mightily with self-perceptions. And more.Opportunities
abound for the documentarian of human misery: war, hunger, poverty,
homelessness, domestic violence, abuse. For the "concerned
photographer," a term coined in the late 1960s to describe a
commitment to conscientious, humane witness, it's a matter of
deciding where to turn, what to focus on and how. Lauren
Greenfield, a photojournalist based in L.A. and a member of the
photo agency VII, has directed her attention since the early '90s
to phenomena that arise out of our culture of excess problems born
of economic affluence and social privilege, media saturation and
the societal drive toward immediate gratification. She chronicles
the external manifestations of mainstream America's compromised
soul. Her first major project, published in the book "Fast Forward:
Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood," examined sexually
accelerated, artifice-happy youth culture. "Girl Culture," her next
project, expanded upon one facet of the first: body image as
expression of identity and reflection of cultural expectation. Her
newest work zooms in closer still. "Thin" takes a look at residents
of the Renfrew Center, a Florida treatment facility for women with
eating disorders. The book "Thin" was recently published by
Chronicle Books, and "Thin," the documentary, is scheduled to air
at 9 p.m. Nov. 14 on HBO. The large color photographs from the
project on view at Fahey / Klein Gallery constitute no more than a
slender slice from the overall enterprise. They are not meant to
stand alone, nor do they communicate consistently well in this
context. They need the partnership of words, and they get that
brilliantly in the book, in the form of personal narratives and
diary entries by the subjects, commentary by medical and
sociological experts and a tone-setting introduction by Greenfield.
Although the project seems to fit easily on a continuum with her
other work, Greenfield asserts that societal conditions are only
part of the story of "Thin"; mental illness is the real issue. The
text in the book fleshes out the particularities of each woman's
interior struggle. The pictures describe external appearances that
clash mightily with their self-perceptions. Where we see
famine-level emaciation, they see an ideal not quite reached. We
see quite literally in the portrait of Ata with her arms clasped
overhead the attenuated limbs and knobby joints of an Egon Schiele
figure; they see in themselves the ample, overloaded bodies of a
Rubens. One of the most captivating pairs of pictures shows a young
woman named Aiva on her first day of treatment and 10 weeks later,
upon completion. A barbed reversal of the diet ad pitch, the
"before" photograph shows 16-year-old Aiva looking like a bony,
angry preteen. "After," the angles of her face have softened, her
chest, torso and arms have filled out, and she has blossomed into a
healthy (and happier) looking young woman. A selection of
photographs from Greenfield's previous two series is also on view
at the gallery, and they are pithy evidence of all sorts of
cultural distortions having to do with wanting (and having) too
much, too fast. They are situational tableaux, intertwining of
character, context and action. The images on view from "Thin" are
largely portraits, many taken on the grassy institutional grounds
of the Renfrew Center. They introduce the players in this painful
saga of self-loathing and self-improvement, but they can't deliver
much more in the way of feeling or fact. A few are chilling in
their depiction of the extremes these women have reached through
purging and restricting, as well as cutting. Greenfield's pictures
are intimate and candid. Their authenticity derives from the trust
required between photographer and subject, trust that each will
deal only in raw truths, and with respect. The gravity never lets
up. But it does edge aside occasionally to make room for irony and
even dark humor, as in the photograph of one Renfrew patient with
her father, a man with sizable paunch, sagging double chin and a
tattoo of the female ideal, a sexy pinup girl, on his forearm. The
pictures are descendants of the work of Mary Ellen Mark and Larry
Fink. They're the findings of an astute cultural anthropologist
feeling her way and helping us feel ours through the familiar and
the outrageous, through individual trauma and societal disease.
-Los Angeles Times
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