The Way I See It: Lauren Greenfield

I was born in Boston, but we moved to Venice Beach when I was eight. It was very much hippy times. My parents split up and we lived in communes with both of them. I still live there, but it’s much more gentrified than it was. It wasn’t a place where people raised families. It was more like Jim Morrison, artists, drug dealers, crime.

Moving to France with my mother in 10th grade started me off as a documentarian. I started observing culture and trying to assimilate. Mum left after three months and I wanted to stay, and a family of fallen aristocrats took me in. 

For a kid in LA, where class is solely identified by money, it was very different.

I wasn’t like them, but I was really good at fitting in, so I learnt to speak French. Between that and living in a commune, I learnt how to be a chameleon and get into people’s lives and talk to them.

My first documentary project [Survivors of the French Revolution] was about the French aristocrats and, for a kid in LA, where class is solely identified by money, it was very different. That started me thinking about class, culture and social mobility.

Above: An image from Greenfield’s book, Generation Wealth (2017) [Lauren Greenfield, courtesy of the Fahey/Klein Gallery].

A lot of themes I’ve worked on over the past 30 years go back to my time in France.

I got an internship at National Geographic, based on my French aristocracy project, and I landed in heaven. I had an office, $400 a week, access to cameras and as much film as I wanted. The job was to look at film coming in from the field. I was learning how to construct a story.

I’ve always been pushed and challenged creatively by crossing boundaries, whether trying something in fashion, or doing a commercial with a documentary feel and using real people. I grew up at a time when a lot of the boundaries were being broken down. I’ve had a lot of fun with that breaking down of borders.

I realised advertising wasn’t only a way to make extra money but a way to really have impact.

I started on commercial photography with a Nike women’s campaign, with Goodby Silverstein. It was around the time I had my first kid, and I knew I had to mix it up and do commercial work. I took assignments that brought me into worlds and ideas that filled my first book, Fast Forward. My second, Girl Culture, was almost all done on assignments.

The Nike campaign [Who Are Your Heroes?] was very meaningful. I was on assignment for Time, doing a cover story about teens in Missouri. They’d never heard of my book about teenagers, Fast Forward, but they had my Nike ads on their bedroom walls. I realised advertising wasn’t only a way to make extra money but a way to really have impact.

Above: An image from Greenfield’s debut photography book, Fast Forward (1997) [Lauren Greenfield, courtesy of the Fahey/Klein Gallery].

The Like a Girl Super Bowl edit was incredible. It stopped people in their tracks. It was so different, tonally, and to have feminine protection and female hygiene in the middle of the Super Bowl was just so different.

Miraculously, it was all shot in a day. It started out as a three-minute piece, which no one thought people had the attention span for, but it went viral from the beginning. There were millions of views in the first three weeks, and then it went crazy. It just caught fire. It’s my most watched piece ever. 

It’s harder to do award-winning work with a commercial. There are so many hands in the pot.

I’d done a lot of documentary-style commercials, but what was unusual about Like a Girl was that they came to me thinking about my book, Girl Culture, and the campaigns I’d done for Leo Burnett about girls. They were thinking of me from the start, and they really let me have a hand in it. 

It’s harder to do award-winning work with a commercial. There are so many hands in the pot. But with Like a Girl they really let my voice come through. 

When we started winning advertising awards, I’d go to Cannes and the Clios for the first time, and all the people winning were guys in shorts and T-shirts. 

I realised how few female voices were really breaking through in advertising. I’d had that experience in photography and film, of people being interested in a female voice because it was a subject matter and a perspective they hadn’t seen before.

Above: Greenfield's hugely successful spot for Always, Like a Girl.

Fast Forward and Girl Culture really helped establish my voice and got me an audience, and I felt that in commercials we really needed that female voice, not just for equity but for reaching female consumers.

My husband Frank and I started our company, Girl Culture [now called Institute] as a roster of female voices. Part of the reason I wanted an all-female roster was that there was a token woman on every roster. I was at a company owned by two women, and I was the only female director for a long time there. That was the impetus.

Photography is so sensitive to fresh points of view and needs new ways of looking at the world, so it’s naturally diverse. At Institute, each person has their own vision and auteur stance. That’s what I look for. And a purity of intent. We’re not really focused on who anybody is, but on the stories that they’re telling, their intent and expression.

Photography is so sensitive to fresh points of view and needs new ways of looking at the world.

I never know where a documentary is going. In Thin, they were pushing up against the authorities, but I didn’t know what was going to happen when I started out. With the Queen of Versailles, we didn’t know beforehand they were going to lose their house or be affected by the financial crisis. 

With The Kingmaker, I went in thinking it was going to be about Imelda Marcos as a footnote of history and had no idea her son was going to run for and become vice president of the Philippines. I love that journey of discovery.

Above: David A. Siegel and Jackie Siegel, the stars of Greenfield’s 2012 documentary, The Queen of Versailles, which has recently been made into a Broadway musical [Lauren Greenfield, courtesy of the Fahey/Klein Gallery].

I set up Social Studies [FX on Hulu] as a social experiment. There were parameters from the start – get a diverse group of students, get access to their phones for a year, and look at how social media is impacting their lives.

They had to share their phones and social media and that dictated the structure, as I had to figure out a technology to get the media off their phones. We had about a thousand hours of film and 2,000 hours of social media. And it was a two-year edit, with six editors and a supervising editor from London. 

It was a really ambitious project. Each episode had a strong thematic focus. The first was about bullying and image, the second was class and race, the third about algorithm pressure, which is the new peer pressure. The fourth was about sex and pornography, and five was about suicidal ideation, but it was also about these kids finding their voice. And it ends with surprising hope. Because they survive.

Above: The trailer for Greenfield's recent Emmy-nominated documentary series, Social Studies.

I wanted it to all come from the kids’ point of view, no talking heads, no tech people, no experts. We documented so much tough stuff. The through line was how aware, observant and insightful they are. 

That they were not just the subjects but also the experts was a really interesting revelation. And even though they knew so much, and could break down what was happening to them, it didn’t give them immunity from it. They could speak with authority and expertise, but [also] from experience.

I wanted it to all come from the kids’ point of view, no talking heads, no tech people, no experts.

The group discussions were so powerful. The kids really wanted to be in the room talking to each other. It was the first time they could see other people going through similar things, and you could see how they really connected with each other’s stories.

Social Studies has touched a nerve, in terms of people relating to it internationally, and getting into what it is doing to our kids and how we can mitigate some of the negative results. And we got an Emmy nomination!

It’s talking to two different audiences: those for whom it is a very big part of their lives, and the parents and grandparents who don’t understand it. In the show we try to speak to both audiences, and that’s really interesting.