Girl culture is the key to understanding what it means to be a young woman today or in the past. In every historical epoch, girls have formed a unique set of activities and concerns generated by their developmental needs as well as the adult society in which they live. What girls do, how they think, what they write, whisper, and dream, all reveal a great deal about them and about us. Lauren Greenfield’s photographic vision of contemporary girl culture is both a revealing documentary record and a disquieting personal commentary, infused with a distinctly sympathetic but biting point of view.

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 another’s 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. Celebrated for their purity, innocence, and all-around spunk, American adolescent girls in 1900 were considered a great national resource. (Some continued to believe the old Mother Goose rhyme that girls were made of “sugar and spice and everything nice.”)

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.

In the l990s, a warning about girls was sounded by some best-selling books such as Meeting at the Crossroads by Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan and Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher. These powerful discussions alerted the nation to the psychological difficulties of growing up female in a society that silences and stifles girls even in social and educational settings thought to be enlightened. Other studies confirmed that women really are the “stronger sex”—that is, until puberty, when their vulnerability to physical and mental health problems increases. In The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, I argued that our current cultural environment is especially “toxic” for adolescent girls because of the anxieties it generates about the developing female body and sexuality. On the basis of my reading over one hundred personal diaries written by adolescent girls between 1830 and 1980, I concluded that as the twentieth century progressed, more and more young women grew up believing that “good looks”—rather than “good works”—were the highest form of female perfection. The body projects that currently absorb the attention of girls not only constitute a “brain drain,” but can also threaten mental and physical health.

Lauren Greenfield’s 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. Greenfield’s 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 culture’s 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 seems an inevitable consequence.

Greenfield’s camera confirms that little girls in contemporary America learn early about artifice and sexual power. At four or five, they are comfortable vamping in makeup for the camera and capable of mimicking the erotic moves of the models and pop stars who call the cadence in American popular culture. The image of Allegra, a four-year-old with golden mules on her feet and seductively positioned arms and legs, is a notable contrast to the infamous pictures of JonBenet Ramsey, another eroticized child. In the Ramsey case, the child’s makeup, hairdo, and clothes were chosen by adults for the portfolio she used in her beauty competitions. In Allegra, Greenfield documents a beloved game of dress-up. The revealing body language hammers home the point that children are born anthropologists, able to expertly deconstruct and mimic what culture offers them, especially in terms of gender roles. Before they even abandon their teddy bears, contemporary girls embrace the erotic. They also understand that their power as women will come from their beauty, and that beauty in American culture is defined, increasingly, by a certain body type displayed in particular ways.

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.

In this milieu, some body projects become exaggerated and even pathological. Greenfield touches on eating disorders and self-mutilation, two of the more destructive behaviors in the current repertoire of adolescent psychiatric disorders. We see no pizza or burgers here, perhaps because food and eating are so problematic for a generation of girls who attach such a high value to being supremely thin. The anorectic, nowadays an iconic figure, makes a predictable appearance, but not just as an unhappy adolescent: We see her morphed into a still-struggling adult. A single, dramatically lit photograph of perfectly circular breasts undergoing surgery reminds us of the growing number of American women and girls whose quest for physical perfection leads them to intrusive medical procedures. Images like these suggest that appearance junkies are made, not born, by the enormous array of body projects and pressures at large among us.

Historically, we are a nation that loves the idea of the makeover (take, for example, Charles Atlas, the skinny guy who had sand kicked in his face before he became big and brawny), and Greenfield illustrates this aspect of our national character in a memorable series of individual and group portraits taken at a weight-loss camp in New York’s Catskill Mountains. Fat is a special liability in adolescence, an emotional reality that these photographs present with great sensitivity. Greenfield’s portraits of overweight campers provide an unerring sense of the social and emotional costs associated with being a fat girl in a culture that worships display of the female body. As these campers wait in line to be weighed and measured, we wonder about the unseen but important parents, the money, and the values that prompt families to embark on this kind of therapeutic quest to make their children slim and, somehow, “better.” Instead of being pedantic, Greenfield’s camera also asks us how we feel about the sight of bodies that are less than perfect by contemporary definition.

The weight-loss camp series —with its sad faces and ample flesh—may cause some viewers more embarrassment than the photos of graphic sex play on the beach in Panama City. In fact, our discomfort with these “unsightly” images of obese young women suggests a fundamental alteration in how we think about puberty, a moment when females of the species naturally add adipose tissue to their growing frames. In our current cultural climate, we make little room for the awkwardness and special blooming associated with pubertal growth and development in girls. We prefer, instead, that our daughters stay irrevocably slim for their own sake and for ours. (“My mother weighs me with her eyes,” an anxious student revealed to me about her well-meaning but misguided mother.) In a related manner, we make no room for aging, because that, too, is an assault on the ideal of the perfect body. All of the mothers and daughters in Greenfield’s lens are virtual look-alikes whose dress and behavior seem virtually identical despite the age differences. Among the affluent mother-daughter sets, good mothers are fashion models and shopping companions, not comforters or mentors. Generational distinctions appear to have evaporated; preening together has replaced cuddling together.

In a girl culture dominated by concerns about the body rather than mind or spirit, familiar rites of passage—such as Bat Mitzvah, quinceañera, graduation, and prom—are 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 quinceañera 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.

Men are in the background, but Greenfield gives them their due as audience, confirming their well-known capacity for “objectifying” women and their bodies. In the style of cinema verité, we watch Sara, a lean, pretty blonde, walk the streets of New York, and we can feel the ways she is noticed and evaluated by men. At a toga party, we observe adolescent boys bonding over the sultry pinups in a slick girlie magazine. And in a torrid photograph of a lap dancer, taken from the perspective of the john who pays her, Greenfield’s camera forces us to experience the male point of view as a lithe and youthful female body undulates in our face.

But the political message here is not about men or the damage they do to women’s sexuality and self-esteem. The message in this collection is about the interaction between the garish commercial culture, which Greenfield knows so intimately through her work, and the psyches of ordinary girls. Her photographs consistently point to the unhappy symbiosis between the special psychological needs of adolescent girls and the superficial, narcissistic content of so much of what young people see in the popular media. In this respect, Lauren Greenfield is adding her name—and her artistic power—to the growing number of girl advocates who believe that American popular culture is especially dangerous for girls. Instead of case studies or diaries, she gives us an ambitious artistic rendering of the problem.

In the end, the mirror is the most powerful and consistent visual metaphor in this disquieting photographic essay. Everywhere, we see women and girls looking in mirrors, nervously checking who they are. Some grimace; others stare intently and some pose; few flash back at the mirror a smile of happy, relaxed recognition. Women understand this kind of hyperconcern because most of us have a love-hate relationship with our own full-length and magnifying mirrors. We rely on the mirror (and also the scale) to assess personal worth and establish who we are, although both devices fail us as meaningful sources of mental and spiritual nourishment while we mature and age. Ultimately, Greenfield’s work makes the ironic point that in spite of how much American women and girls look at themselves, we are not a self-reflective society.

Although there are many young women in the United States whose lives have not developed this harsh edge, the hyperbole in Girl Culture still rings true, suggesting the face of what’s likely to come in the decades ahead. These haunting images should leave us feeling, but also pondering, the problems and concerns that are transforming girlhood and diluting some of its sweetness.

Yet ultimately, this collection speaks to us of ourselves. Our minds are filled and our days are busy with the body projects central to Lauren Greenfield’s photographic vision. Most honest women will admit that it is a challenge to live one’s life today without reference to the cultural imperatives that energize American popular culture and the consumer society. As hard as we try to resist shallow messages telling us to be and look a certain way, it is not easy to step outside one’s own culture, a culture in which visual images predominate. Few female viewers will put this book down without a moment of self-recognition.

Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York

Greenfield, L. (2002). Girl Culture. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, p. 5-8. Retrieved April 21, 2005 from http://dizzy.library.arizona.edu/branches/ccp/education/girlculturefacultyguide/.