Photographer Lauren Greenfield
makes clear her perspective in her essay at the end of Girl Culture. She writes, “Most of all, I am interested
in the element of performance and exhibitionism that seems to define the
contemporary experience of being a girl.” 
She explains her work is influenced by Naomi Wolf’s The
Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women and Joan
Jacobs Brumberg’s The
Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. Her sensibilities are solidly feminist, and
her photographs illustrate the ways the bizarre and cruel ways that female
gender roles available to girls lead them to sacrifice their welfare for social
approval. Many of the photographs are
accompanied by text written by the subjects of the photos, reflecting on their
lives.

It’s clear that Greenfield finds
much to disturb her in modern gender roles. 
Some of the most powerful images in Girl Culture are from a
weight loss camp for children and teenagers in the Catskills, New York. The girls look unhappy and preoccupied. Other pictures show women at an eating
disorders clinic, desperately thin, but still struggling with their feelings
that they are overweight. Greenfield
clearly finds much of contemporary femininity to be absurd – one photograph of
contestants in the Fitness America competition in particular stands out: all
the women are waving with their right hands, presumably to a camera out of the
picture, bending at the knees slightly with their left hands on their left
thighs, all wearing fake smiles. As
with any feminist critique of gender roles, there’s a fine line between
targeting the roles and targeting the women who take on those roles. The women at the competition look ridiculous
and sad. In other images, such as those
of 13-year-old girls in Minnesota posing in nice dresses before the first big
party of the seventh grade, the girls look confident and mature, although there
may be some underlying anxieties beneath the surface. These images show girls and women preoccupied by their looks, and
some show great anxiety about looking good, while others enjoy the process of
dressing up and being flirtatious. For
the most part, Greenfield shows great compassion for the girls and women in her
images, although occasionally she seems to exhibit a bewildered fascination
about how they participate in their own exploitation. This is especially clear in the case of women who get breast
implants or college girls pandering to groups of men at Spring Break in
Florida.

Greenfield’s images are full of
saturated colors. They are sometimes
posed for the photographer, but more often they are journalistic, with the
subjects largely oblivious to the camera. 
Even when they are not posed, though, the women and girls are aware of
their looks and always seem to be posing for some audience. Greenfield’s
message and themes are plain, and the images lack subtlety and complexity. There are no layers of meaning here; the
photographs wear their messages on their surface. There’s no sense of artfulness or an aesthetic stance in these
pictures. They could easily serve as a
focus for discussion in trying to raise awareness about the pressures on girls
in modern society. Girl Culture
may give its readers reasons to reflect on the experience of girls, and it has
enough variety to avoid a simplistic or reductionist view. Nevertheless, it is not clear whether
Greenfield’s work sheds any new light on gender beyond what has already been
discussed by a great many feminists.

The most powerful images of Girl
Culture are those accompanied with personal stories, and the book would
have been more effective if it had focused more on the lives of the girls and
women Greenfield shows. The text
accompanying the images do provide some context for readers to understand the
emotions of the subjects, but still, in many of the pictures, one is left
wondering what exactly is going on and what else is going on apart from the
obvious. So this is an interesting and
worthwhile project, and some of the images are especially strong, but as a
whole it lacks the incisiveness of the best social commentary in photography.

© 2003 Christian Perring. All rights reserved.