Lauren Greenfield - All of Everything Else

PERSONAL LIFE

Born 1966 in Boston Massachusetts, not much is known of Greenfields childhood, teenage years or reason she chose to do photography. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Environmental Studies from Harvard in 1987 and currently lives with her husband and two children in California.

CAREER

Greenfield’s start was interning for National Geographic Magazine right after college. There she received a grant to produce her first project called ‘Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood.’ Based around youth and adolescents fast track to adulthood, this is one of her most notable projects. She spent four years travelling around Los Angeles photographing teenagers in both wealthy and poverty stricken communities. Girl Culture and THIN were her next two projects. Greenfield’s Girl Culture documents American girls and women in photographs of their social lives and private rituals, and includes quotations by the subjects. (3)

Fast Forward slideshow

Girl Culture snippet

TECHNIQUE

Greenfield uses general photography techniques when photographing. She cares less about the image quality or artistic nature of the photograph and more about what it conveys as well as its ability to promote a message of social change or address an issue. She doesn’t like to stage photographs and her subjects almost always involve people. She tries different approaches to framing and composition depending upon what she wants the photograph to depict. She would be considered an instrumentalist.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Her work is in many major collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, the Center for Creative Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), the Smith College Museum of Art, 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. Her photographs have been regularly published in magazines including the New York Times Magazine, Time, Vanity Fair, People, National Geographic, Stern, The New Yorker, ELLE, Harper's, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, The Guardian, and The Sunday Times Magazine.  She has been the recipient of many awards, including the International Center for Photography Infinity Award, the Hasselblad Grant, the Community Awareness Award from the National Press Photographers, and the Moscow Biennial People’s Choice Award. (1)

MY THOUGHTS

Because of photography’s capability to describe reality it has been used as a means to document and take witness to world’s events and ways of life. Documentary photography usually functions as a means of providing visual information or evidence of the “real world” with the aim of bringing awareness and attention to events of the time as historical facts. Sometimes photographs are created without concern of the private experience of the photographer, but rather to attend to an outer experience of what’s in front of the lens and what needs to be seen or addressed. This is what Greenfield intends to capture, nothing of herself and all of everything else.

Works Cited:

1 Lauren Greenfield Photography. Biography. 2011

http://www.laurengreenfield.com/index.php?p=RMCD4CNH

2 Lauren Greenfield. Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia. 2011

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Greenfield

3 Barrett, Terry. Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012. Print.