U.K. newspaper the Guardian has interviewed Lauren about her “best shot”—a photo of four “popular girls” from a school in Edina, Minnesota. The 1998 image is part of Lauren’s Girl Culture book.
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From Lauren Greenfield's "Girl Culture."
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“This picture was taken in 1998, at a time when people were just beginning to realise what ‘mean girls’ were, and how brutal and cliquey and excluding they could be,” Lauren tells the Guardian. “I was on an assignment for The New York Times Magazine, for a special issue about being 13. They sent me to a place in Minnesota called Edina, right in the heartland of the US. … This group of girls were in the popular clique at their school. …
“This assignment led directly to my Girl Culture project: a set of photographs through which I saw that the body had become the primary expression of identity for girls and women, and explored the devastating effects of that. I went into Girl Culture with an open mind, and I came out with a feminist perspective.”
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Selected photos from Girl Culture will also be on view starting this summer at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, which is mounting a major exhibition of work by important documentary photographers. In addition to Lauren, “Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography Since the Sixties” will feature Leonard Freed, W. Eugene Smith, Susan Meiselas, Mary Ellen Mark, Larry Towell, Sebastião Salgado, and James Nachtwey. The show will be up through November 14. More details here.
For lots more Girl Culture photos, go here. And to see a short video interview with Lauren from this time period, go here.
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