Girl Culture (photo exhibit)- Lauren Greenfield

[/ dave /]

http://www.zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/girlcult/index.html

Mirror, Mirror…
by Lauren Greenfield

Girl Culture has been my journey as a photographer, as an observer of 
culture, as part of the media, as a media critic, as a woman, as a girl.

These photographs are both very personal and very public. They are about 
what is private and what is public and where the line that divides the 
two lies, when that line exists at all anymore. They are about the 
popular culture we share and the way the culture leaves its imprint on 
individuals in their most public and private moments. They are about the 
girls I photographed. They are also about me. I was enmeshed in girl 
culture before I was a photographer, and I was photographing girl 
culture before I realized I was working on Girl Culture.

In this work, I have been drawn to the pathological in the everyday. I 
am interested in the tyranny of the popular and thin girls over the ones 
who don’t fit that mold. I am interested in the competition suffered by 
the popular girls, and their sense that being popular is not as 
satisfying as it appears. I am interested in the costly and 
time-consuming beauty rituals that are an integral part of daily life. I 
am interested in the fact that to fall outside the ideal body type is to 
be a modern-day pariah. I am interested in how girls’ feelings of 
frustration, anger, and sadness are expressed in physical and 
self-destructive ways: controlling their food intake, cutting their 
bodies, being sexually promiscuous. Most of all, I am interested in the 
element of performance and exhibitionism that seems to define the 
contemporary experience of being a girl.

These interests, my own memories, and a genuine love for girls, gossip, 
female bonding, and the idiosyncratic rituals of girl culture, have 
motivated this five-year photographic journey.

There are girls and women in my photographs whom viewers may see as 
marginal or whose lives may be perceived as extreme. In effect, the 
popular culture has caused the ordinary to become inextricably 
intertwined with what to many seems extraordinary. Most girls are 
familiar with “marginal” experiences from television, magazines, and 
music. A suburban teenager says she would like to become an exotic 
dancer. A prepubescent girl mimics the sexualized moves and revealing 
clothing that she sees on MTV. Understanding the dialectic between the 
extreme and the mainstream—the anorexic and the dieter, the stripper and 
the teenager who bares her midriff or wears a thong—is essential to 
understanding contemporary feminine identity.

The body has become the primary canvas on which girls express their 
identities, insecurities, ambitions, and struggles. It has become a 
palimpsest on which many of our culture’s conflicting messages about 
femininity are written and rewritten.

Photography is an ideal medium with which to explore the role of image 
in our culture. The camera renders an illusion of objective 
representation, just like a mirror. But as every woman knows, a mirror 
provides data that, filtered through a mind and moods, is subject to 
wildly differing interpretations. This project has been my mirror and my 
attempt to deconstruct the illusions that make up our reality.

Lauren Greenfield



-- 

/  dave  /