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Product Description
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Photographs by Lauren Greenfield look at how external appearances can clash mightily with self-perceptions. And more.
Opportunities abound for the documentarian of human misery: war, hunger, poverty, homelessness, domestic violence, abuse. For the "concerned photographer," a term coined in the late 1960s to describe a commitment to conscientious, humane witness, it's a matter of deciding where to turn, what to focus on and how.
Lauren Greenfield, a photojournalist based in L.A. and a member of the photo agency VII, has directed her attention since the early '90s to phenomena that arise out of our culture of excess problems born of economic affluence and social privilege, media saturation and the societal drive toward immediate gratification. She chronicles the external manifestations of mainstream America's compromised soul.
Her first major project, published in the book "Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood," examined sexually accelerated, artifice-happy youth culture.
"Girl Culture," her next project, expanded upon one facet of the first: body image as expression of identity and reflection of cultural expectation.
Her newest work zooms in closer still. "Thin" takes a look at residents of the Renfrew Center, a Florida treatment facility for women with eating disorders.
The book "Thin" was recently published by Chronicle Books, and "Thin," the documentary, is scheduled to air at 9 p.m. Nov. 14 on HBO. The large color photographs from the project on view at Fahey / Klein Gallery constitute no more than a slender slice from the overall enterprise.
They are not meant to stand alone, nor do they communicate consistently well in this context. They need the partnership of words, and they get that brilliantly in the book, in the form of personal narratives and diary entries by the subjects, commentary by medical and sociological experts and a tone-setting introduction by Greenfield.
Although the
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Everybody wants to be thin. I've been here for almost three weeks, and I'm gaining weight way too fast. When I was thin, I had all this control. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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For this reason, I highly recommend both the book and the documentary for those who actively want to recover, and need inspiration, and to those who are having a difficult time understanding why a friend or loved one is going through it. Greenfield pulls no punches and does not sugar coat any aspect of the girls recovering at the Renfrew Center in Florida (to my knowledge there are no males shown at this facility when the filming occurs, despite the fact that there are men with eating disorders too) Be warned the footage is graphic - there is a lot of vulgar language, views of these women throwing up (one even literally tosses her small dog out of the bathroom, then locks the dog in a crate just so she can have privacy while she vomits), and both the book and the DVD show women's scarred bodies both from self-mutilation and from suicide attempts.
All in all, I am very impressed with Greenfield's work. Well done.
Thanks Lauren, for reminding me of what it's like to be embroiled in an all-consuming obsession with food and weight and worth--of never being good enough, of letting an inanimate object (food) determine my value. I'm happy to be free, even though I never got deathly "thin." I was thin and am thin . . . enough.
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