Director and photographer Lauren Greenfield, who has created documentary-based works on themes ranging from rich kids in LA to eating disorders, as well as the enormously successful ad Like A Girl, tackles our global obsession with money and materialism in a new book, Generation Wealth. Unsurprisingly perhaps, she paints a rather dark picture of life in the 21st century.By Eliza Williams
Lauren Greenfield first struck upon the narrative within Generation Wealth while working on a film called The Queen of Versailles, which followed the story of a billionaire family who were trying to build the largest house in America. When the global financial crash of 2008 took place, it dramatically intruded on their story.
“They end up having a super-sized foreclosure story,” says Greenfield. “They’re over-leveraged like everybody else. So in a way they were this allegory that represented what I had seen in so many places, from suburban California to Ireland to Iceland to Dubai, and spoke to the kind of flaws that got us there, in a very global way. Seeing very similar kinds of imagery, and similar kinds of consequences in so many places throughout the world – and also from different socio-economic groups – made me think that all of these stories were somehow connected and the crash turned them into a morality tale.”
Appropriately, Generation Wealth is itself an outsized tome, running to over 600 pages and featuring imagery going back over 25 years to the 1990s. It examines various themes, from how advertising has combined with the breakdown of community to create an addiction to goods and luxury, to the notion that even before you might become wealthy, it is now acceptable to pretend you are, to ‘fake it ’til you make it’.
The 90s images feature a 12 year-old Kim Kardashian as well other wealthy kids in LA who at the time the shots were taken seemed outlandishly privileged. “I made a picture of these two girls in a limousine eating pizza going to a concert,” says Greenfield. “It was a very provocative picture at the time, people were uncomfortable with that kind of excess.” Looking at the photograph through today’s eyes though, and especially alongside what comes later in the book, the girls’ behaviour seems impossibly tame, innocent even.
For over the next two decades comes extraordinary levels of extravagance, ranging from the comedic – a 24k solid gold toilet – to the disturbing. There are graphic scenes of plastic surgery as well as luxury living on a colossal scale. As a reader, diving into the book is initially a salacious, voyeuristic experience, especially as Greenfield accompanies the images with interviews with the protagonists, who recount fascinating and emotionally candid tales of excessive, extreme lives.
It might be easy to think that the subjects featured bear no relation to life outside the super-rich bubble, but over the course of the book, Greenfield forces the reader to examine their own place within this new cultural order. For it is her belief that we are all affected by it, no matter how different our lives may seem.
“I feel like it affects everybody, because part of the process that I’m documenting is how when you see it, you’re changed by it,” she says. “Part of it is about the exposure from the media – how that takes away our innocence, how it makes us want certain things, how that breeds desire, how that impacts our perceptions of the world. One of the things that I was interested in was the research that shows that affluent lifestyles have been increasing in the media since the 70s, and that seeing those images makes you think other people have more than they actually do and also stimulates desire. I think that exposure is everywhere.”
Read the article on creativereview.co.uk
See the feature - Generation Wealth
Visit the new Generation Wealth website here