American photographer Lauren Greenfield’s latest work is a study of wealth and how its sources and effects have evolved over the last 25 years
Rachel Segal Hamilton
LAUREN GREENFIELD was trawling through her archive of more than half a million images, taken over the past 25 years, when one picture made her stop in her tracks. Staring straight down the lens is a 12-year-old Kim Kardashian. Standing around at a school dance with her sister Kourtney, she’s instantly recognisable; beautiful, not in the glossy way she is now but fresh-faced, with a nonchalant style that feels ever so 1992. “I had discarded it because she wasn’t important at the time,” recalls Greenfield, “but because of the rise of reality TV and celebrity and because the aspiration to affluence became important in my work, she became a cultural touchstone.”
The Kardashian picture appears in her Generation Wealth book, published in May by Phaidon. It’s just one example of how the full implications of her work became clear to Greenfield in retrospect. “With the crash in 2008, I realised that a lot of the stories I’d been telling since the ’90s were connected,” she explains over the phone from LA, where she’s in the middle of installing her ‘Generation Wealth’ exhibition at the Annenberg Space for Photography. “Stories about excess, our unquenchable thirst for acquisition, the addictive quality of consumerism… The crash turned it into this morality tale that had international repercussions.”
Over the next eight years Greenfield painstakingly went back through all her work together with curator Trudy Wilner Stack, and began to reframe the story. The book went from 300 pages to 500 pages as she weaved well-known projects in with previously unpublished work and new series shot in China, Russia, Dubai and Iceland into chapters titled ‘The Princess Brand’, ‘Sexual Capital’ and ‘The Cult of Celebrity’, among others. A chronicle of what Greenfield calls “the influence of affluence”, Generation Wealth brings together some 650 images from projects ostensibly about different things – child beauty pageants, eating disorders, the sex industry, youth culture. Their major unifying theme: our obsession with money and what we’ll do to get it.
“I can in hindsight track a straight line from the rise of Gordon Gekko to the rise of Donald Trump, from the beginning of marketing to kids that starts in the ’80s and �
