July 2012 | Lauren Greenfield '87

Lauren Greenfield '87 (Photojournalist & Director)

By Sara Melson '90

Greenfield.jpgLauren Greenfield '87 picked up her first camera at her alternative elementary school, Area D, and continued to develop a passion for photography that grew over childhood and throughout high school. From the beginning, she was drawn to photograph people and real situations, observing culture from her own unique perspective. Still, says Lauren, "I never considered myself an artist.” Then, over the course of her junior year at Harvard, an international honors program afforded her an opportunity to travel the world with a select group of students and faculty mentors for nine months, intensively studying film and anthropology both on screen and in the field, and interfacing with luminaries from museums and film institutes in each country. This trip was "life-changing” according to Lauren.

"We watched many indigenous films, and we met with amazing directors. It was on that trip that I realized my calling. I wasn't sure if it would be sociology, film, photography, or anthropology, but looking at culture was my calling. When I got back to Harvard, I switched my major from Social Studies to Visual Studies. I soon realized that theory wasn't my medium, and I moved toward filmmaking and photography. The work from that year has really influenced my photography. I even met my husband, Frank Evers '87, in Vienna during that fateful trip.”

After Harvard, Lauren applied to several film schools, only to be rejected by all of them. She spent a year after graduation on a Radcliffe fellowship, working on her first big documentary project, about the French aristocracy. She waitressed in Cambridge and was a lab monitor in the Carpenter Center, so that she could have access to the darkrooms and to her teachers. "I always figured I'd get a ‘real’ job, not be a professional photographer,” says Lauren. "I figured I'd give myself this one year to do this photography project, and then I'd get serious about life."

Then came an opportunity that would steer the direction of her career. Lauren was awarded the prestigious National Geographic Internship; over two hundred people apply for the position. "It was only three months, but it was practical and was like graduate school. I learned lighting and working with color, which is a more commercial way to work. That was the experience that gave me a new respect for the journalistic and storytelling side of photography; the idea of the photographer as storyteller rather than just an illustrator of stories. It also gave me mentors who are still my mentors. I still wasn't sure if I could be a professional photographer, but at that point I did want to try.”

Lauren started working as a photojournalist, moving to London with her then fiancé, Frank, to do an internship with the Sunday Times. In 1991, she moved back to her hometown of Los Angeles to collaborate with her Professor of Psychology mother Patricia on a piece for National Geographic about a village in Chiapas, Mexico. "It was a turning point trip for me,” says Lauren, "because I learned what I did not want to do. The story didn't ultimately run at Nat Geo, although it was republished a month ago. But I didn't feel like the pictures were my own or reflected my point of view. I realized that the pictures I wanted to take were ones that commented on society in some way. I felt like all I could do in Mexico was document what I was seeing, but there wasn't any unique element of my voice, or my take on it, coming through.” Around this time, Lauren read Bret Easton Ellis' LESS THAN ZERO. "There was something about this jaded, cynical world that spoke to me, and that became my first project, photographing at the high school I went to (Crossroads, in Santa Monica) and then at other high schools, and then going younger, photographing younger kids around LA, who were growing up too fast. FAST FORWARD was me finding my voice. After that, it opened up a lot of doors. Once you find that, then people can see that, and then you're hired to do what you want to do. That opened up my career and my expression.”

What followed––in addition to numerous opportunities to work as a high-end commercial photographer––was artistic recognition. Lauren quickly became known as a photographer with a distinct cultural & sociological voice. Her acclaimed photographic documentary series, all of which were also published in book form and exhibited at major museums, are thematically cohesive, focusing on the identity issues of kids’ development, eating disorders, celebrity, and society’s relationship to money, beauty, aging, and fame. THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES connects back to the study of consumerism, which is what FAST FORWARD and BEAUTY CULTure are about,” says Lauren. "The new film is about wealth and status, and ties back into that and our culture's values around money, consumerism, and fame. FAST FORWARD came from my own experience in high school. It was very ‘Hollywood’; there were a lot of wealthy kids, and I wasn't from that background. I was an observer... With GIRL CULTURE, I drew on my own issues around popularity and body image and beauty; and BEAUTY CULTure is really about aging. When I was 26, my dermatologist offered me Botox, and that launched my work on aging. I did a book called THIN about eating disorders. I'd never had an eating disorder, but had issues of my own around body image, like most women in our society.”

THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES was introduced by Robert Redford at the opening night of the Sundance Film Festival. Lauren won Best Director for the film, which chronicles the tale of a billionaire family in Orlando who wanted to build the biggest house in America, and whose fortunes were affected by the economic downturn. "It’s an allegory about the overreaching of America; a sort of supersized foreclosure story,” says Lauren. "This one story about one family embodies all the themes of what I'd been working with on this wealth project, as well as themes from BEAUTY CULTure and GIRL CULTURE, for the past ten years.”

Lauren remarks that making her first feature-length film was a challenge. "Our journey was as crazy as the journey of building the house,” laughs Lauren. "Our company, Evergreen Pictures, produced it, my husband Frank Evers was the exec producer, we always spent the money before we had it, and we finished three days before our premiere at Sundance.”

The film, which was bought by Magnolia Pictures and Bravo, opens in theatres July 20th and has been making the rounds at numerous festivals: London, Sundance, San Francisco Film Festival, Hot Docs in Toronto, and the Los Angeles Film Festival. Lauren is also working on a new book to come out in the fall of 2013, with a working title of WEALTH: THE INFLUENCE OF AFFLUENCE.

In addition to her illustrious career, Lauren has an enviably stable and workable home life, despite extensive travel. "Gabriel is six, and Noah will be twelve in early July. Frank is also from the class of ‘87. We've been together for 25 years, since I was 20. He produced BEAUTY CULTure and exec produced QUEEN OF VERSAILLES, and he started an artist management company called INSTITUTE, which reps me and twenty other photographers. We do everything from the studio behind our house. I'm so dedicated to work and so consumed by it that I feel like it would be a negative for most people, but because we came up together doing this, and work together, it's such a bond. We don't take getting to do the work you love for granted at all. When there's an opportunity, we both jump at it. When I had Noah, I got a fax to go to China to photograph wealthy youth for TIME ASIA for ten days. I pumped 400 ounces of milk and left Noah at ten weeks old with Frank and a full freezer. Classic pattern of anxiety and over-achieving, because when I came back, there was still milk left. It also created an amazing bond between Frank and Noah.”

Lauren Greenfield has crafted a fully realized life, living it on her own terms and expressing her truest self through her provocative and insightful storytelling. "Most people in our field need to make compromises to make a living, so I feel very lucky to have been able to do the work that's meaningful to me… It's such an unexpected gift to be able to work as an artist.”

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