Lauren Greenfield: Generation Wealth

“In the Sixties, they unlocked the gilded cages in which some of the aristocrats had felt confined and gave the former outcasts a chance to have a ride inside,” writes Marilyn Bender in her 1967 book The Beautiful People. As style reporter for the New York Times, Bender spent a decade observing the unholy marriage of art, fashion, and money achieved by the postwar boom and a burgeoning media. Her book marked the rise of mass culture and the myth of the classless society. This was a period when the social register mingled with Warhol’s freaks and queens; a Park Avenue housewife could aspire to Girl of the Year; French intellectuals were reading comic books; and youth culture was born from a lust for the new. 

Half a century later, driven by mass media and global capital, the Beautiful People have become Generation Wealth, as photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield puts it. Her commercial and documentary work captures socialites, bankers, rappers, strippers, the down-and-out, and the nouveau riche—all of them touched by “the influence of affluence.”  

Generation Wealth is a multi-platform retrospective of Greenfield’s work over twenty-five years. A museum exhibition, which originated at LA’s Annenberg Space for Photography, arrived at the ICP Museum in New York in September, accompanied by a hefty book bound in gold silk and a forthcoming film. This dense visual history, which pairs images with first-person narratives, begins in LA during the 1990s and tracks the myths of American prosperity around the globe.

The show brings Greenfield back to the museum that first exhibited her work in 1997. That exhibition, Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood, featured photographs of youth culture in Los Angeles—teenagers in a parking lot after school flashing hundred-dollar bills for the camera; a young boy on a pony posing with his trainer. Fast Forward signaled Greenfield’s interest in consumerism as a powerful influence on individual and social identities.

Later, she explored the impact of consumer culture on feminine identity and the female body in nationally touring exhibitions such as Girl Culture, an exploration of American girlhood and “the self-esteem crisis amongst American women,” and in THIN, her award-winning feature documentary for HBO, which went inside a residential facility for the treatment of women with eating disorders.

Greenfield’s gift for cultural observation was shaped by formative