GIRLS

Joan Jacobs Brumberg in a conversation about Lauren Greenfields's Girl culture (2002)

A century ago, the culture of girls was still rooted in family, school, and community. When they were not in school or helping Mother, middle-class American girls were reading, writing, and drawing, as well as playing with their dolls. Many young girls knew how to sew, knit, crochet, and embroider, generating homemade crafts to decorate their rooms or give to friends as they sipped hot chocolate and read aloud to one another. Young women flocked to the Girl Scouts and the Camp Fire Girls, only two of many national and local single-sex groups in which they could learn critical skills under the close supervision of older women. When girls were together on their own, they chattered about new hair ribbons and dress styles and inscribed sentimental rhymes in one anothers autograph books. In private, many prayed and wrote earnestly in their diaries about how they wanted to improve themselves by helping others or becoming more serious people.

A hundred years later, the lives of girls have changed enormously, along with our perception of them. Girl culture today is driven largely by commercial forces outside the family and local community. Peers seem to supplant parents as a source of authority; anxiety has replaced innocence. Despite the important and satisfying gains women have made in achieving greater access to education, power, and all forms of self-expression, including sexual, we have a sense of disquiet about what has happened to our girls.

Today, as girls mature into adolescence, bodies dominate their emotional landscape more than anything else. A series of photographs of popular girls from Edina, Minnesota, an affluent suburb, suggests the ways in which a certain kind of body and personal style conveys formidable power and authority in the teenage and young-adult years. In all kinds of settings Edina and elsewhere Greenfield provides access to the daily life of adolescent girls, their cliques and friendships, and the garden-variety body projects that are central to their self-definition and to the American economy: making up, tanning, waxing and shaving, shopping for cosmetics and clothes. A portrait of an unhappy teenager, assessing her breasts in a dressing-room mirror while a girlfriend looks on, stands as a powerful symbol of all the self-hate and bad body fever that characterizes normal American women. As much as we enjoy our consumption activities (i.e., shopping till we drop), many of us are plagued by a pervasive sense of not measuring up, especially in the dressing rooms where we spend so much time selecting our clothes.


Lauren Greenfields arresting collection of photographic images brings new energy and insight to the larger societal discussion of what has happened to American girls. Her savvy, on-the-spot camera is a function of her work as a photojournalist recording the world of American popular culture, but her work ranges here beyond celebrity icons such as Jennifer Lopez and Venus Williams to reveal both the inner and exterior lives of anonymous American girls. In combining the voices of girls with their portraits, Greenfield acts as reporter and cultural anthropologist as well as art photographer. She used such a mixed-media strategy before, in the award-winning Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood, but this journey takes her nationwide into different regional and ethnic communities. With an eye for both the ordinary and the idiosyncratic, she provides an animated, colorful canvas that visually narrates the ways in which girls, their bodies, and their psyches entwine with American popular culture. Be forewarned: There are no Girl Scouts here. Greenfields camera probes the process of becoming a woman in a decidedly less institutional way, visiting bedrooms, bathrooms, and waiting rooms, seeking out little girls, teenagers, and adult women in telling public and private moments. Throughout this provocative collection, girls exist in relationship to older women. By juxtaposing child and adult in visual counterpoint, Greenfield astutely suggests that our cultures images of female maturity profoundly impact on the sexuality of girls, even those at a very young age. She deftly captures the exhibitionist nature of contemporary American femininity in garish images of glitzy porn stars and exotic dancers, ambitious models and edgy actresses all adult women willing to use their bodies in flamboyant, hyperbolic ways for entertainment, commerce, and sexual power. We see and feel the filter-down effect: in the giggly girls who privately stuff their bras and pose in imitation of these cultural icons, and in those who take up erotic performance in more public venues. In a series of photographs from Panama City, Florida, Greenfield provides access to a moment and place in which young women bare their breasts to ogling men for the thrill that it brings to both parties, while another mimics (with help) an acrobatic blow job as a form of sexual horseplay. With exhibitionism so much in vogue, sex without either privacy or intimacy

In a girl culture dominated by concerns about the body rather than mind or spirit, familiar rites of passage such as Bat Mitzvah, quinceaera, graduation, and promare also transformed into shallow commercial events dominated by visions of Hollywood and celebrity magazines. These rituals are deeply important to girls, yet they no longer carry a great deal of emotional weight. Instead, they involve frenetic forays into the marketplace, worries about what to wear, and a preoccupation with the pictures that will document the event. Greenfield is less than sentimental about the big events of the teenage years. At a fancy Bat Mitzvah, a young teen casts a skeptical look to suggest that she is not really interested in dancing with this particular boy; in a sleek, shiny limousine, Los Angeles girls destined for a quinceaera celebration seem less than engaged, even apprehensive, in their elaborate party clothes. At the Crenshaw High School prom, also in Los Angeles, African-American teenage girls emulate the revealing styles of the stars but seem unable to exude confidence or formulaic smiles. The majority of youthful faces here seem tentative, diffident, even desperate.