Clik here to view.
In the award-winning "Like A Girl" ad campaign sponsored by Always, photographer and documentarian Lauren Greenfield asked young girls and boys to do a certain task (run, fight, throw) like a girl. She also asked older people — teenagers and young adults — to do the same thing.
The results were drastically different: The older participants seemed to think that doing anything "like a girl" was worth making fun of. And as a little boy explained, he wasn't insulting his sister — he was just insulting girls. The young girls, however, who hadn't yet reached puberty, thought running like a girl meant going "fast as you can," or hitting home runs.
The ad touched on the idea of how society can shape culture's view of gender. In her book, Generation Wealth, published in May 2018, Greenfield is examining global society's understanding of money and wealth.
Generation Wealth is a huge book. It's also gold and very heavy, with a photo of a little girl sitting on a fake pony, staring directly at a camera. A woman watches her, wearing a sweater that says I'm A Luxury on the front. You can almost hear Veruca Salt from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory singing "I Want It Now." Money has always mattered to people, but Greenfield's book seems to show that it has become one of the world's reigning virtues.
"The work is about how image has trumped substance over the last 25 years," Greenfield says. "You pick up something like this that's beautiful and gold silk, but when you go through the pages and read through, you understand pretty quickly that this is not an aspirational experience, but actually a kind of devastating one about where our aspirations have gotten us."
Years ago, Greenfield worked at National Geographic doing international photo assignments. Her examination of youth culture began in the early-1990s in Los Angeles, where she is from, and she began to look at kids in the private school she went to. Some of that was reflected in a previous work, "Fast Forward," but after the financial crash in 2008, she decided to widen her frame. In 2012, she released The Queen of Versailles, a documentary that followed Jackie Siegel and David Siegel, the owners of Westgate Resorts, as they rushed to build the biggest single-family house in the United States in the face of the economic decline. Her latest collection for Generation Wealth is currently on exhibition at the Annenberg Space for Photography in L.A., and will be showing at the International Center of Photography in New York this September.
"I realised that all of the stories I had been doing about culture, and the values of globalism and consumerism had been exported to other countries, and had led us to that crisis in some way," Greenfield says. "I wanted to rethink the things I had shot before, and I went back through all the outtakes. I found things like Kim Kardashian at 12 years old at a party. She wasn't in the original work because she wasn't important, and when I found the picture, I didn't recognise her at first. I looked at my notes and read: 'the daughter of the O.J. Simpson lawyer Robert Kardashian.' She became such a touchstone for the way our culture has changed, so I put that in, and other things I found."
Greenfield says she wants to create a "new narrative" about wealth and how that has changed the world over the last few decades. Ahead, she talks to Refinery29 about the highs and lows of money-obsessed culture.
Clik here to view.
I think the word "generation" is really appropriate in terms of how you framed this book. How did you see young people and adolescents growing up with an understanding of money and consumerism, compared to how adults think of it?
"Kids have always been really important in my work, for two reasons. One is they're extremely honest, and they reflect the cultural influences in a very transparent way. In the interviews, for example, where as an adult might be more guarded, a kid will just say, 'Money ruins kids. I think money has ruined me.' They're incredible truth tellers.
"But the other really important thing that has happened over the last 25 years is the huge increase in direct marketing to kids, as well as technology. When I started this work, it was the beginning of MTV having a huge influence, so that was a part of the work. A lot of those trends are still there, but they've blown up as internet and social media became a seller of these messages.
"I spent a lot of time thinking about how kids are affected by advertising, and in particular how girls are affected by advertising. How it affects their image of themselves, and their body image. In a way, what I came to is the idea that capitalism basically thrives from exploiting insecurities. You can sell someone something they think they need to make themselves okay, to fill a hole, or to fill a feeling of inadequacy. Then, once that's filled, there's a new inadequacy.
"It's certainly not limited to girls and kids. I looked at the poor wanting to be rich, immigrants wanting to assimilate, and people from former Communist countries wanting to operate on a global stage with the West. It's like any insecurity tends to be exploited differently, but where it's been the most dramatic and poignant for me is in my work with girls and with women. They're so bombarded with messages of inadequacy that the measures they need to be okay become so draconian. I spent a long time looking at eating disorders, plastic surgery, and what women will do to stop the ageing process. When you are taught from a young age that your body is what gives you value, it becomes imperative to preserve that value."
Photo: Courtesy of Lauren Greenfield/Institute.Clik here to view.
How did people's relationships — with their coworkers, family members, or friends — change as their views about wealth shifted?
"That's sort of in the subtext of the interviews; it's not something I looked at directly. I think what comes out is a breakdown of community. You can see it even in the housing boom, and the housing bust. People bought the biggest, or the most expensive home that they could afford. They moved into communities that might be really, really far from where the work, but that had granite counters, and where they could build pools.
"The other piece is a kind of alienation you hear in a lot of the interviews. It's more of a general feeling — I don't think it directly affects friendships or love relationships — but there is a sense of sort of being disconnected. One of the big things I looked at is how in these 25 years, we started to spend more time with the people we knew on TV, or spend more time with the TV than [with] our actual neighbours. We started to want the things we saw on TV, rather than the traditional things our neighbour down the road had. 'Keeping up with the Joneses' became Keeping Up with the Kardashians — this impossible aspiration.
"In the book, social critic Chris Hedges says that Facebook is the end of friendship. Friendship is about being vulnerable and showing somebody your real self. Social media is about popularity and presentation. I think that has consequences for our relationships. Part of it is that we're driven to work more to achieve that presentation, which takes a toll on relationships. I think there are consequences to that, but that's more in the subtext of [my] work."
Photo: Courtesy of Lauren Greenfield/Institute.Clik here to view.
I liked that you covered a lot of different communities in this book — international ones, ones in different economic classes, people from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, people working for multinational conglomerates, people working at Atlanta strip clubs. What differences did you see among people in terms of how they conceive of money?
"The surprising thing I saw were the similarities. You could go to the ghetto and people wanted Versace, and you could go to Beverly Hills and people wanted Versace. There was this shared culture and common ground, in some ways — but it was based on capitalism.
"One of the things about this book that people don't always realise until they read the stories is that a lot of people in it are not rich. It's really about the aspiration of being rich, what I call the influence of affluence. Sometimes, it's hard to tell. It takes a little while before you can actually tell who's the 1% and who are the wannabes. Of course, I have never been interested in documenting the rich just for their own sake. I'm really interested in documenting the 1% because they have this huge influence on everybody else. Their lives are so visible that they set the tone for what people want.
"I've been interested in looking at how, across 25 years, we've moved from a culture that used to prize discretion in some way — at least by frugality and hard work, with success being a result of those things — to a culture that just prizes lifestyle, and bling, and celebrity. Playing the role is just as good as being the role; nobody even cares."
Photo: Courtesy of Lauren Greenfield/Institute.Clik here to view.
I find that idea really interesting — the impression of what having money can be like. It's like Gatsby, right? Looking put together — whether you have to borrow something, rent it, or buy it for a job interview, for example — can really give a favourable impression. How did you see people engage with that globally?
"What you're describing is exactly the reality in China. Tom Doctoroff, who is the head of one of the ad agencies interviewed in the book, says that luxury is a tool on the battlefield of life for the Chinese. It's not a frivolous thing, he says. It's not a personal indulgence. It's actually what you need to have face and ascend in business.
"There are a lot of people in the book who are posing and showing off, but I'm not judging their behaviour or saying that they shouldn't be making those choices. In a lot of those cases, I actually think they're making very rational choices given the values of the culture. Beauty does help you get a job. Looking like you have something does make people want to play with you, or work with you. These values are all around us. What I'm trying to do is reveal and deconstruct the dynamic so we can question it — but not judge the people making those choices.
"For example, Brooke Taylor [one of the people in the book] is a prostitute at the Bunny Ranch. She was college educated, and came from a good family. She worked as a social worker and made $35,000 a year, until she realised she could make that amount in less than a week as a prostitute. She makes that choice. One of the things that I think is important to look at is how we became a kind of post-moral society. Because if the metric of success is only money and lifestyle, then that's a logical choice. So, I'm not judging anyone in the book. I am really grateful to the people who were brave enough to be truth-tellers."
You've seen the nature of work change. Is there anything else to add about capitalism, consumerism, or how people earn money and what that looks like?
"It's funny and shocking, but it's also really sad. When you read through the whole thing, I think it's a really dark vision by the end. I hope it's taken as a cautionary tale and as a way to think about what kind of world we want to be in, and leave our children.
"We have more inequality than ever before, and less social mobility than 25 years ago. In my parents' generation, you could grow up poor and still go to college and become middle class at least. People felt that optimism and that possibility, and that was the basis of the American Dream. Now, most people don't feel that. In a way, that is the backdrop to the fake it 'til you make it mentality — that fictional social mobility is the only real social mobility."
Photo: Courtesy of Lauren Greenfield/Institute.Generation Wealth, the documentary, is out in cinemas in the UK on July 20th. Watch the trailer here.
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