Lauren Greenfield: Social Studies
The Fahey/Klein Gallery is proud to present Lauren Greenfield: Social Studies, a new photographic exhibition that revisits the terrain of youth culture and identity formation in the digital age. Expanding on her acclaimed five-part docuseries of the same name, Social Studies (FX/Hulu) marks Greenfield’s return to a subject she has explored since her groundbreaking 1997 debut, Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood.
Shot during the 2021–2022 school year across Los Angeles—a city synonymous with image and aspiration—Social Studies follows a diverse group of teens navigating high school, home life, and relationships under the influence of ever-present social media. This new body of work builds on Greenfield’s legacy as a visual sociologist, capturing the tensions between online performance and private identity, aspiration and anxiety, vulnerability and self-curation. Lauren Greenfield’s photographic approach parallels her immersive filmmaking: both document a reality that is evolving in real-time.
Lauren Greenfield: Social Studies is a continuation and an evolution of the artist’s decades-long interrogation of American culture. Through the raw honesty of her subjects and the clarity of her vision, Greenfield creates a powerful meditation on adolescence, what she calls “comparison culture”, and the search for authenticity in a curated world. As she continues to investigate the themes of status, beauty, identity, and power, this new series reflects her ongoing commitment to making the invisible visible—revealing how young people see themselves and how we construct and consume those images.
Lauren Greenfield is an Emmy-award-winning photographer and filmmaker and has been a preeminent chronicler of youth culture, gender, and consumerism for over twenty-five years. Her documentary The Queen of Versailles won the Best Documentary Director Award at Sundance in 2012 (coming to Broadway as a musical this fall, starring Kristin Chenoweth with music by Stephen Schwartz), and her films The Kingmaker, Generation Wealth, and THIN have garnered Emmy, Critics Choice, WGA, & DGA recognition. Greenfield’s award-winning books include Fast Forward (1997), Girl Culture (2002), THIN (2006). In recent years, she directed the ambitious documentary Generation Wealth (2018) and published a retrospective monograph, a global investigation of materialism and social status that synthesizes decades of her photographic work. In partnership with the Annenberg Foundation, who also collaborated with Greenfield on the Social Studies docuseries, the Generation Wealth exhibition toured museums around the world opening at the Annenberg Space for Photography, and traveling to the ICP, the Nobel Peace Center, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, the Hague Fotomuseum, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Copenhagen), and Fotografiska. Greenfield’s photographs—including entire bodies of work such as Fast Forward, Girl Culture, THIN, and Generation Wealth—are held in major institutional collections, including the Harvard Art Museums, the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson), Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the International Center of Photography, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, among others.