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Summary: Every picture tells a story...
Review: Of course, it is a cliche that every picture tells a story and a picture is worth a thousand word, but "Girl Culture" can't be described any other way. The pictures so well illustrate the struggles and concerns of today's teenage girl. The dramatic illustrations and accompanying stories prove just how hard it is to grow up female and maintain a sense of self and high self-esteem. Some of the pictures and stories will break your heart, others will inspire anger and disgust, but over all the emotions evoked by this book are powerful and motivating. This book is a must for understanding the lives of teenage girls.
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Summary: The New Yorker Review
Review: THE NEW YORKER, November, 2002Sex - its promise and threat - sticks like a second skin to the mostly affluent, mostly teen-age subjects of Greenfield's dizzying documentation of female rites of passage. In Greenfield's photos, printed in the supersaturated pinks and blues of a Britney Spears video, girls visit fat camps, endure breast-enhancement surgery, and lie in tanning beds; they're self-possessed and awkward in equal measure. Among the photos - which together could easily comprise a leaden (and rather predictable) commentary on the excesses of American girlhood - are some startling juxtapositions: in one, a group of smiling, glossy-haired students at a private girl's school hoist their candy-colored bridemaids' dresses to reveal lacy garter belts. In another, an African-American teenager hikes her skirt to reveal legs to a trio of white judges at a model search; the historical allusions are as sad as the expression of resignation on the girl's face...
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Summary: Very chic and lovely!
Review: 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.
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Summary: Very chic and lovely!
Review: 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.
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Summary: American Photo Review Jan/Feb 2003
Review: 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."
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Summary: lame photos and dreary topic
Review: This book should be called "white girl culture"... there is hardly an ethnic looking girl in the book! Lots of suburban teen-age girls looking like they are trying to be fit in. Nothing really insightful, new or surprising. Some photos are a bit interesting but most are overly self-conscious from subject and photographer... sorry but these images are easy to forget,(and border on teasing male viewers)... save your money and wait for the video!
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Summary: Disturbing and insightful
Review: This book visualises "The Beauty Myth" (by Naomi Wolfe).
I want to be beautiful, who doesn't? But why? Why do women (and increasingly men aswell) have to be beautiful? The pictures presented are both disturbing - in their context - and insightful. For some reason they leave a grim image of women not liking themselves and wanting to be someone else. On the other hand the book also contains pictures and stories of women and girls who are happy to be who they are. Read this book along with "The beauty Myth" and you'll never look at another 'beauty'-commercial for clothes or cosmetics the same way you did before. Both books are true 'eye-openers'.
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Summary: Eerily amazing
Review: When I first saw this book in my photo class, I thought the images were amazing and frightening at the same time, but I didn't read the text with all the pictures. When I bought it for myself, and got to read everything, it gave me even more of a respect for this work. Her snips of these girls lives rattle and amaze you at the same time. I love this book so much, and I think every girl/woman should look at it.
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Summary: Not bad, but not worth it
Review: While the photographs of Lauren Greenfield were beautiful, I found the subjects she chose to be predictable and a poor representation of girlhood for most of American girls. Come on...fat camp? anorexics? models? a few spring break photos for good measure? Greenfield's book would've been groundbreaking in the early 90's, but her subjects have been done-over and over again. It appears that Greenfield herself was looking for something profound in her subjects. The results feel labored, and almost eager, as though the photos have an invisable caption attached. There is neither spontaniety, nor profundity in the way she frames her subject. There are a few photos which I did like. For example, the photographs of a young girl's quinceanera (a "sweet " fifteen) are lovely and refreshing. I also enjoyed the accompanying text, in which the girls talk about their life.
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Summary: An Unflinching Look at the Cauldron that Forges Women
Review: With a lens that doesn't shy away from the 4 year old in a mini sequined gown, the cheesy backstage of a Las Vegas strip club, a surgical suite during a breast augmentation, or Panama Beach, FL at spring break, Lauren Greenfield's wide ranging photoessay provides an honest insider's view of the culture that forges women in the U.S. today. Anyone raising girls, anyone who was a girl, and anyone interested in trying to understand women, should have this book! What a magnificent find!
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