Unfortunately, I was not able to make this opening and only got to see the exhibition just before it closed a few weeks ago, but the work is incredible, and I wanted to make sure I wrote something about it.
I think Lauren is an incredible photographer and I think her body of work will be an important archive for future generations attempting to understand the societal changes which have occurred with the growth of cellular phones and massive amount of available digital content we have experienced in the first quarter of this century.
Like most every good documentary photographer the biggest key to her success gaining access and building trust with the people she is photographing. She also has technical skills and crafts powerful images. I have known about Lauren’s work for some time, and I specifically remember years ago, when my daughter was a teen, she found Lauren’s book 2002 book “Girl Culture” on my bookshelf, and she fell in love with it.
Fahey Klein describes the exhibition as follows:
Lauren Greenfield: Social Studies, a new photographic exhibition that revisits the terrain of youth culture and identity formation in the digital age. Expanding on her acclaimed five-part docuseries of the same name, Social Studies (FX/Hulu) marks Greenfield’s return to a subject she has explored since her groundbreaking 1997 debut, Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood.
Shot during the 2021–2022 school year across Los Angeles—a city synonymous with image and aspiration—Social Studies follows a diverse group of teens navigating high school, home life, and relationships under the influence of ever-present social media. This new body of work builds on Greenfield’s legacy as a visual sociologist, capturing the tensions between online performance and private identity, aspiration and anxiety, vulnerability and self-curation. Lauren Greenfield’s photographic approach parallels her immersive filmmaking: both document a reality that is evolving in real-time.
Lauren Greenfield: Social Studies is a continuation and an evolution of the artist’s decades-long interrogation of American culture. Through the raw honesty of her subjects and the clarity of her vision, Greenfield creates a powerful meditation on adolescence, what she calls “comparison culture”, and the search for authenticity in a curated world. As she continues to investigate the themes of status, beauty, identity, and power, this new series reflects her ongoing commitment to making the invisible visible—revealing how young people see themselves and how we construct and consume those images.
The most incredible element of this exhibit is the fact most subjects allowed Greenfield’s team to capture thousands of hours of their screen time. Greenfield then edited the material and combined images of screen capture with her portraits to make an incredible montage that most accurately documents the experience these teens are having online. It is so well done and so powerful. Another incredible thing with Greenfield’s subject is many attended Pali High which was destroyed in the Pacific Palisades Fire this past January. That fact deepens the value of this project for me.
As a street photographer I have long been aware of the impact that the cell phone has had on our society. I remember photographing in New York during the summer of 1988 and how banks of payphones were commonplace, and they were gathering spots for teens. In the late 1990’s to early 2000’s I would see more and more cellphones in my photographs each year and less payphones. Today it is nearly impossible to photograph on the street without seeing someone on the phone or someone holding a phone. People are absorbed by the content on their phones and many young ladies seem to walk with phones in their hands as if they phones provide some amount of immediate security. The impact of the cellphone is obviously a double-edged sword and worthy of its own blog post later, I just mention this because I am glad Lauren did such a deep dive into the subject and that she it did it so well.
I also picked up a copy of Lauren’s massive 500-page 2017 book “Generation Wealth” on my visit (I already had copies of Fast Forward and Girl Culture in my library). The book is an incredible documentation of wealthy societies and individuals. I am in awe how many places she has been able to get to and the images she has captured. The logistics of travel alone would be more of a challenge than I could handle let alone the photographing and filming aspect. There is one epic point in this book (pages 226-227) where she documents New Years Eve parties in St. Bartz. On Page 226 there is a 1998 image with Harvey Weinstein talking with Arista Records’s Clive Davis and Sir Michael Caine. There was a comment in the title that people knew they had status when they were invited to Davis’s New Years Eve party. On the opposite page was an image of Diddy (29-year-old Sean Combs at the time) at his 1999 New Years Eve party at Feeling Nightclub making a woman expose her breast to gain access to his party. It is an amazing pairing of images especially when you consider the book was first published in 2017, a year before Weinstein was arrested.
There is so much content in this book I probably won’t ever get through it all, but it is an incredible document that will provide future generation of researchers lots of material to consider. I have so much respect for Lauren as a photographer, she has been able to capture so many amazing images that document our era.
I also want to thank Heather Cronan and Nicole Boyle at Fahey Klein for their time pointing out some incredible details in the exhibition. I have talked with them on other visits, and they have always been great hosts who are obviously passionate about the medium of photography.