Stockland Martel Blog

Here’s an excerpt from Rebecca Mead’s insightful, laudatory review:

Greenfield’s interest is often in the limits of what can be bought and sold, and the psychological costs of materialist acquisition. A series of portraits, taken over a decade, of Suzanne, a successful hedge-fund executive, first show her at age thirty-seven, a Louis Vuitton purse on her desk and an Hermès scarf around her neck. She talks about her use of cosmetic enhancements—she started Botox at twenty-nine—and her embrace of fertility treatments with her soon-to-be husband. “Money means access to the best health care without having to worry about it,” she says. Later images reveal the ways in which even as much money as she has cannot, in fact, erase worry: an image shows her reclining on her bed, grimacing through the Botox as her husband injects her in the thigh for the fifth round of in-vitro fertilization. (Eventually, Suzanne had a daughter with the help of a surrogate; her husband left six weeks after the baby came home, and she now employs a live-in nanny, who, Suzanne says, takes the child to those activities “where there’s no value-add to me being there.”)

Read the full review here.

The exhibition “Generation Wealth” opens September 20 at the ICP in New York City. More info here.

Learn more about the book and exhibition at generation-wealth.com.