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The opening spread of Communication Arts' feature on Lauren Greenfield, from the May/June 2011 issue.

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Stockland Martel Blog: What was the impetus for your interview with Lauren?
Anne Telford: She had long been on the list of photographers the magazine was interested in featuring. A number of elements are considered when formulating the editorial for an issue of CA, including a subject’s specialty, location, gender, etc., in relation to the other profile subjects and who/what has recently been covered. And Lauren’s work proved a great fit for the May/June issue.

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SMB: Had you interviewed her before?
AT: I had long admired Lauren’s work but had not had the opportunity to meet her before our interview in mid-January. I am a big fan of her books Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood and Girl Culture.

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SMB: What were you most keen to ask her about for this piece?
AT: I wanted to know what drew her to a particular topic. The answer, of course, is too complex to relate here, but suffice to say that like many artists, she draws from experiences in her own life, and obviously growing up in Hollywood can have a big impact on a person. I think for Lauren, it’s made her aware of what is of real value and meaning, and she has focused her work on issues that are not the least bit trivial or superficial. She turns a mirror to culture, whose shiny surface sometimes reflects back the inherent ugliness in our celebrity-obsessed culture.

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SMB: Lauren is one of those photographers who people think they know, or know all about, because she’s been written about a lot and lectures often. What did you learn about her and her work in this piece that surprised you?
AT: She seems to be completely fearless. Lauren is a petite woman. She has photographed gang-bangers and some really tough, scary people in L.A. She has great character, and you can see that she does not put up filters—she photographs the grit and the scars as well as the glossy veneer. When I asked her how much location work she did, she said, “Everything is on location.” If Lauren had a TV, show the tagline might read: Real journalistic stories, real people, real places, all the time!

Lauren Greenfield.

Perhaps people respond so openly to Lauren, whether she has a camera in front of her face or not, because of her steady gaze and her demeanor. She is a take-charge person, one who instills confidence. For all her accolades and achievements, she is very gracious and down to earth. She is a polished, professional person, but very warm and genuine. And she has the most striking blue eyes, like Steve McCurry’s famous picture of the Afghan girl on National Geographic’s cover.

From a very early age, Lauren was exposed to different cultures and experiences, and they resonated with her in a serious fashion. Her interests turn into photography books and documentary films, after all!

I have interviewed many extraordinary photographers over the last 20 years. Lauren is one of the most admirable people I’ve met in this industry, and given the egocentric nature of the field, she is surprisingly low key. She truly has a vision, she understands her drive, and she simply goes about the work, juggling family, travel, research, and shooting. She seems to have a real sense of balance about career and family.
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SMB: Magazine writers often find themselves having to make tough choices about what to include in a story; there’s almost never enough space to say everything they want. Are there any interesting tidbits that you weren’t able to fit in your story?
AT: The opening spread shows both longtime Vogue editor Anna Wintour and a model falling on the runway. Lauren’s sister told her that the woman in the photograph reminded her of a racehorse breaking its leg, and indeed, it does draw unsettling parallels.

A lot of her work revolves around women and self-image. We spoke at more depth about the downside of the continuum of eating disorders, including cutting and promiscuity. The downside for me, as a writer, was knowing going into our interview that I had roughly 1,400 words in which to describe this woman and her career, which in turn meant that I had to focus on achievements and placing her within the pantheon of contemporary photographers, leaving precious little space for analysis or comparison. It’s a challenge because you know you will have to leave out so much.

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I felt honored to be let into Lauren’s life for a few hours and to watch her at work, and to select images and consult with her team and her husband, Frank Evers, who is also her manager. Sitting at their dining table over lunch, which she ordered from a nearby deli in Venice, I looked up from my salad and contemplated some of my favorite Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander photographs, which she has hanging in her home. It made me feel lucky. I wandered out into the sunny Southern California day to explore the canals of Venice (wondering which house had belonged to Dennis Hopper), before hitting the San Diego Freeway to head home.

Spending time with Lauren Greenfield definitely makes you want to up your game!

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SMB: Thank you, Anne!

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Anne’s bio:

After 14 years as the founding managing editor of Communication Arts, Anne Telford moved to the position of editor-at-large when she relocated to her hometown, La Jolla, California. An avid traveler, she expanded CA’s international coverage and developed the magazine’s Fresh section. Anne is a board member of Watershed Media, an organization that produces action-oriented, visually dynamic communication projects to influence the transition to a green society, and produces the online illustration newsletter illustrationvoice.com for Serbin Communications, one of her freelance clients. She is also a published poet and photographer, with credits ranging from Émigré, Blur, and Step Inside Design magazines to the Portland Oregonian, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Allworth Press, and Chronicle Books, among others.

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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.”

Click here for the full article.

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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“L8S ANG3LES,” which closes on June 28, also features Catherine Opie, fresh off of her major exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York earlier this year; John Baldessari; Julius Shulman; Tim Street-Porter; Douglas Kirkland; and Greg Gorman. In addition, “L8S ANG3LES” will display archival photos of the city that date back a century, as well as photojournalism from the Los Angeles Times by Lawrence Ho, Carolyn Cole, Kirk McKoy, and Genaro Molina.

Anne Wilkes Tucker, Special Advisor to the Annenberg Space for Photography and the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, explains in the exhibition’s press release that “L8S ANG3LES” celebrates “the breadth of contemporary photography through works by eight internationally renowned photographers whose images capture the complexity and vitality of the city of Los Angeles. ‘L8S ANG3LES’ features different genres of contemporary photographic exploration—architecture, portraiture, photojournalism, and art—with interrelated themes weaving throughout.”

Admission to the Annenberg Space for Photography, which is located in Century City, is free. For more details, visit http://www.annenbergspaceforphotography.org/index.asp

This photo, from Lauren Greenfield’s breakthrough 1998 series “Girl Culture,” is part of the “L8S ANG3LES” exhibition at the Annenberg (from left): Alli, Annie, Hannah, and Berit, all 13, dressed up before the first big party of the seventh grade in Edina, an affluent suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The most popular girls at school, these friends spent three hours helping each other get ready for the party. Only a few miles from the biggest mall in America, 7th graders here are not worried about gangs or school violence but about being popular and fitting in.

What inspired you to photograph the Inland Empire?

It started as an assignment for GQ magazine. All of my books, especially Girl Culture but also Fast Forward, grew through editorial assignments. The economic crisis that we’re in now kind of brings together my work from the past 15 years. The foreclosure story is specifically about foreclosure in the Inland Empire, but for me it’s a case study of the American dream and American values. I was so excited to have the opportunity to shoot in Foreclosure Alley that after the assignment was completed, I continued to go out. It’s still an ongoing project.

The photo essay introduces us to people like David and Wendy, who had always paid their mortgage on time but decided to abandon their home after they discovered they still owed $200,000 more than the house was currently worth. How did you meet the people featured in the essay?

The GQ assignment was kind of short on people. At first, it was more about the houses and the stuff that people left behind. The people were pretty hard to find. My producer, Anna Malsberger, and I used Craigslist. We also found people through word of mouth and through realtors in the area.

The mortgage crisis has created a sort of “us vs. them” dynamic between borrowers and lenders, and certainly has engendered a great deal of resentment among and embarrassment homeowners facing foreclosure.

There’s definitely a lot of shame that goes with foreclosure. I think for somebody like David, he’s not the kind of person that ever expected to walk away from an obligation or took that lightly. He said he was trying to talk to his lawyer to find a solution, and his lawyer said, “I can’t tell you to walk away, but you’re a smart guy-figure it out.” I think a smart guy like him who’s under water and only a few years away from retirement just felt like he didn’t have any good choices except to walk away. One of the things with him and Wendy was they took great care with their house. Their great pride was their backyard and their fountain. When they left the house, they moved the fountain to their daughter’s backyard, and I photographed it there. Backyards were one of my obsessions. People would buy, like, a $200,000 house that would appreciate to $400,000, then they would take out a $200,000 loan. They would have these modest houses with yards that were, for example, Hawaiian inspired and had tiki bars.

Generally speaking, your work prior to “Foreclosure Alley” has been largely figurative-the images in photo essays such as “Girl Culture” and “Kids + Money” usually center on a person or a number of people. But in “Foreclosure Alley,” there are many landscapes and environmental photographs. Abandoned houses, neglected pools, and vandalized property are as much the subjects of this essay as the homeowners themselves, it seems. How do you feel this project is different from your previous work?

Even though I have always been a people photographer, I’ve also always had a strain of still life in my work-informational accents that kind of comment on the people in the pictures. For this project, I started doing a lot of still lifes and pictures without people because it was really about spaces and what was left behind. That was the thing that really hooked me on the project-they call it “life left behind.” There was one house where the family left all their personal effects: family photographs, kids’ soccer trophies, paperwork for 401k plans, couches, keys, food. It’s just so shocking, in a way, and sad to see the loss and dislocation. That was the only time that I almost cried, even though a lot of the people had sad stories.

What do you want people to take away from this project?

I really want people to delve into or question our expectations and values around the American dream and what that means. I think there is a national sense of looking in the mirror and understand how we got here, and I think that’s something that’s not limited to rich people or people who are living beyond their means. It’s kind of like we were all living beyond our means. I think everyone feels a little complicit.