Lauren Greenfield
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Lauren Greenfield is an American documentary photographer, photojournalist, and documentary filmmaker. She has published three books of her work, and has been featured in a variety of magazines. Her photographs generally deal with issues relating to youth culture, gender identity, body image, eating disorders, and the influence of popular culture on how we live. In April 2005, American Photo Magazine named her, as a member of the VII Photo Agency, one of the top 25 photographers working today.
Greenfield graduated from Harvard in 1987 with a B.A., majoring in Visual Environmental Studies. Her Senior Thesis project on the French Aristocracy was called "Survivors of the French Revolution". This work helped kickstart her career as an intern for National Geographic Magazine. A subsequent grant from National Geographic helped her with her debut monograph, "Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood" (Knopf 1997). Five years after the release of "Fast Forward", Greenfield produced a second tour-de-force project about the self-esteem crisis amongst American women, entitled "Girl Culture".
Her work is in many major collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, the Center for Creative Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), the Harvard University Archive, the Clinton Library, and the French Ministry of Culture. She is represented by the Pace/Macgill Gallery in New York and the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles.
Ms. Greenfield has also directed a feature-length documentary for HBO entitled Thin, and has published an accompanying book with the same title. This feature documentary film was selected for the Competition at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006. In September 2006, Greenfield received the prestigious Grierson Award for director of the best feature-length documentary at the London Film Festival 2006. This film also picked up the Grand Jury Prize at the Independent Film Festival of Boston, the Newport International Film Festival, and the Jackson Hole Film Festival. She also received an 2007 EMMY nomination for Best Director of Non-Fiction programming for the film, "Thin".
Greenfield's follow-up short film, "kids + money", won the Audience Award for Best Short Film at the AFI Film Festival 2007. The 32 minute film includes interviews with Los Angeles teenagers on the subject of money and how it affects their lives. "kids + money" was also selected into the Official Shorts Program at the Sundance Film Festival (January 2008).
Since starting her career in 1991, her photographs have been regularly published in magazines including the New York Times Magazine, Time, Stern, The New Yorker, Teen Vouge ELLE, Harper's, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, The Guardian, and the London Sunday Times Magazine. She is a member of the VII Photo Agency, an international photographic cooperative, and has received many photography awards and grants, including the ICP Infinity Award, a Hasselblad Foundation Grant, and the People's Choice Award at the Moscow Biennial. She is married to Frank Evers (Chairman/Founder of the New York Photo Festival), with whom she has two sons (Noah and Gabriel), and they reside in Venice, California.
Bibliography
- THIN (Chronicle Books, 2006)
- Girl Culture (Chronicle Books, 2002)
- Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood (Hard cover Knopf, 1997; soft cover Chronicle Books 2002)
Filmography
- "THIN" (HBO, 2006)
- "kids + money" (2007)
