As the influence of Eastern religions and philosophy increase in mainstream American culture, we are recovering the classical ethos that the mind and body are one. The clear interdependence of the mental and physical means that their conditions are linked: when one is in crisis, under attack, or otherwise compromised, the other responds. In Girl Culture, Lauren Greenfield brings her audience's attention to the results of an insidious assault on the American female body that has led younger generations of women into a new era of social and personal identification. While they are taught about the importance of individualism, the value of self, the potential of each person to make unique contributions to the world, girls of all ages are at the same time required to conform to the preeminently important yet narrow ideals of outward beauty and sexual desirability. This situation may sound like tired rhetoric, but the photographs and interviews presented here vividly represent the actual, inarguably familiar, and widely pervasive experience itself.

Girl Culture asks the question, how different are the worlds of the girlish [characteristic or befitting a girl or girlhood] and the girlie [featuring scantily clothed women] in today's popular culture? And if that divide is narrowing, how do real girls sort out this dichotomy as they gauge their behavior by prevailing standards, girls who are often too young to fully understand the implications and motivations of what they are shaped by? How does a contemporary female rectify her inner emotional life, her physiological instincts, and her intellectual grasp of herself in society—evolved from earliest childhood—with the powerful tides of today's commodified womanhood and its host of fantasies and mixed messages?

Lauren Greenfield's project chronicles the community and variety within the vastly shared experience of this “girl culture.” She enigmatically catalogs details of the preoccupation with the body and appearance: from tampons to toenail polish, lipstick to liposuction, clothes to cliques, hard bodies to parties, breast size to boyfriends, calories to contraception. Greenfield goes on to explore the contexts of coming of age in this superficial time: cheerleading squads; quinceaneras and bat mitzvahs; bedrooms, bathrooms and changing rooms; shopping malls; proms and graduations; spring break vacations; fat camp; and team sports. She also infiltrates the image industries that inform these modern-day passages: television, movies, the internet, fashion runways and photo shoots, auditions, exercise emporiums, operating rooms, the cult of celebrity, and pornography. And, finally, she exposes some of the fallout from these profit centers: eating disorders, self-immolation, teen pregnancy, alienation, anger, depression.

With these frank and incisive photographs and the interviews Greenfield collected to give them voice and narrative depth, the viewer is confronted with the extreme territory that escapes few of those who grow up female. It is deep-seated but difficult to name; it is in-your-face but too hot to touch. Lauren Greenfield's vision is historic because it fearlessly probes the obsessions and compulsions that plague women in our commercial culture. She does this in photographs made with such journalistic intensity, media savvy, and revealing, unsentimental empathy that we are forced to wonder at our own contradictions as we remain caught in the web of seduction that is their source.

Trudy Wilner Stack
Exhibition Curator

Stack, T.W. (n.d.) Lauren Greenfield's Girl Culture. Retrieved April 24, 2005 from http://dizzy.library.arizona.edu/branches/ccp/education/girlculturefacultyguide/.