Current Issue/Words/Prose/Katie Vance

The Real Girl Culture - Katie Vance

Lauren Greenfield’s photographic collection, Girl Culture, depicts an unstructured mixture of the ways in which ordinary women and girls conceal personal disappointment on 35mm film.  Greenfield leaves little open to interpretation by interviewing and publishing information about her subjects, thereby providing further connection with the image.  At times the background of a photograph is out of focus, accentuating a subject in the foreground. In other cases the photographs are a bit fuzzy, making them reminiscent of a snapshot from a family photo album.  Her message is clear: she protests female issues ranging from body image and stereotypes to self-awareness and oppression.  The images contain glaringly suggestive elements, such as anxiety vis-à-vis body-weight ideals, bitter antipathy fueled by a realization that sex sells, and chagrin regarding the female anatomy.  Greenfield’s work is culturally relevant because it illustrates adversities females encounter on a daily basis; however, the issues are far more esoteric than many onlookers are aware.  Her compositions reveal the extent of degradation women and girls experience in order to achieve self-indulgent acceptance; the photographs illustrate that self-awareness can be quelled by the longing to assimilate. 

Greenfield(1) traveled for five years photographing and interviewing girls and women for Girl Culture.  Her impetus stems from “the fact that girls learn from an early age that a woman's power comes from her body and its display.”  Her relentless work paid off; her resume divulges success.  Now living in Venice, California, with her husband and two sons, she began her photography career as an intern for National Geographic following her 1987 Harvard graduation.  Scores of magazines published her work and she has won several awards and grants.  Critics’ raisons d'être for positive reviews are countless, and they are all nearly united in their angst for the females photographed.  Of Greenfield’s work, Magdalena Kröner(2) writes: “Greenfield shows the way that these rituals [body displays] conceal a rigid subtext of pain, suppression, and denial.”  Undeniably, her images allege female existence is incessantly and utterly frustrating.  But, as one critic, Thomas McGovern(3), appropriately identifies, “While practically everyone interviewed scorns such superficial ideals, they simultaneously collude by furthering the same stereotypes and pass these misguided ideas on to each other, creating a disturbing portrait of self awareness intertwined with victimization.”  Indeed, the females portrayed actively maintain the perilous cultural phenomena via their involvement, and then, in fact, the photographed women police the domineering boundaries among one another, all amidst a conscious understanding of the hazards rooted in female oppression. 

In Greenfield’s photograph titled Danielle gets measured as Michelle waits for the final weigh-in on their last day of weight-loss camp Catskills, New York, the subject, Michelle, is pinching her skin slightly above her bikini bottom as she watches a tape-measure cinch tighter around Danielle’s chest.  Michelle attends the camp because someone believes she requires assistance losing weight.  Identifying the person responsible is pointless because the crux of the photograph’s significance lies in understanding why Michelle attends the weight-loss camp.  Both girls appear to carry healthy weight.  Considering Michelle as the focal point, she doesn’t look as if she faces dangerous health issues associated with obesity, which could be because she lost weight at the camp.  However, the cultural issue that landed her at weight-loss camp demands a second gaze and empathy.  Certainly, given her physique and American standards, she is unable to work as a model.  She could be a very happy girl devoid of cultural pressures to be thin.  Cultural demands, however, are too great and while a modeling career is likely unobtainable she relentlessly pursues a culturally dictated body size.  Michelle drudges on in her weight-loss endeavor in order to gain acceptance into a fickle culture.  Her reasons for partaking in the weight-loss camp are moot when considering her role as an active player.  As a player in the female cultural game she must monitor the boundaries created to keep females oppressed and sexualized.  She may understand the unfairness of the rules but she abides by them, thus recreating and supporting the existence of female subjugation.  She joins the millions of other women committing the same cyclical pattern, but in this photograph a viewer is torn between judging the subject as victim or perpetrator. 

Like Danielle and Michelle, Devon, from Pornographic film star Devon, 23, with a prospective costar, Woodland Hills, California, finds herself in an anxiety ridden position.  She poses in a bikini, with her enormous artificially-enhanced breasts threatening the strength of the threads that make up her scant top.  Her left arm seductively creeps up to tussle her hair, and a headless man’s hand covers the entirety of her petite stomach.  Devon’s facial features control the photograph.  She is undoubtedly sickened with her circumstance, yet her body motions robotically form to fulfill her female duty.  She is aware of the expectations associated with her sexuality while simultaneously yearning to be free of them.  Her facial expression forces her audience to pause and take a moment to judge.  Spectators feel sympathy for her, but after reading the caption, some of that sorrow fizzles away.  She has a career choice like every one else.  She chooses this; and arguably deserves the subsequent humiliation and aversion.  Many feel envy for her body, because she is fulfilling the female body-image requirements per the unwritten rules outlined in the sexual exploitation of women.  However, she can just as easily be dismissed because of her career choice, thus making her twice oppressed.  Consequently, little, if any, sympathy is offered on her behalf.  Greenfield once again portrays a victim and a villain within one snap of her camera. 

In another photograph a woman known only as “a dancer” occupies the foreground of A dancer hides her tampon backstage at Little Darlings in Las Vegas, Nevada.  The dancer stands with her back to the camera and appears to be engaged in conversation with three people seated in a locker-room.  Two of the people depicted are women; while the nameless dancer’s body conceals the sex-identity of the third—showing only portions of a leg and the back of a white tee-shirt.  The minimally accessible body parts of the third person are likely male, because male presence would elucidate the dancer’s body language.  The unnamed dancer wears a scantily clad tee-shirt, which ends just below her breast line.  She is naked, from what is shown, starting at the base of her shirt to the top of her knees, exposing her dancer’s derriere.  She bends slightly placing her left hand on a table to move closer to the crowd, possibly to converse, while her right hand curls around her back to hide a tampon from the others.  The significance of this photo is the evident embarrassment of the tampon felt by the subject.  Women are particularly privy to episodes accompanying the female anatomy; therefore, a woman’s locker-room seems a peculiar place to be embarrassed of the existence of feminine hygiene products.  The subject’s exposed bare bottom in conjunction with the hidden tampon is bewildering because it appears she is uncomfortable being seen holding the tampon, yet she is at ease baring her lower half.  The dancer’s obvious chagrin regarding her tampon presents a conundrum for many women who, given a choice, would rather bare a tampon in a package rather than the lower half of their body while utilizing a tampon.  The subject displaces her embarrassment.  Her comfort exposing her body is juxtaposed against her discomfort associated with natural functions of her own female body.  Maintaining the female anatomy is not always sexy, which could be why she hides the feminine product.  If the unidentified person in the photograph is male, then deriving reason for the subject’s concealment of her natural bodily functions can be inferred.  Women are expected to uphold a sexualized ideal for men, which include hiding the more ordinary, less-sexualized features of life, such as urinating; tending to menstrual cycles; waxing or shaving body hair; applying or removing make-up; or passing gas.  The subject merely shows that she understands and abides by the male dominant rules constructed to keep her sexualized.  She avoids unmasking her human features; instead, she protects the idea that women are always on cue and sexual, and as a result of her choice, she is a perpetrator in the sexual exploitation of women. 

Three females from three separate photographs cohesively participate in displacing and obscuring healthy female roles in order to gain acceptance from a culture dominated by male ideals.  As active players monitoring and furthering the oppression of women, allocating sympathy for the females is discontenting.  When populations are starving in other nations, or being murdered in wars fought in their homeland, or even starving within the United States, it is iniquitous to prioritize compassion in favor of women who recognize, and nevertheless participate in, the male dominant ideal.  Greenfield’s work is culturally significant because it shows that women admittedly participate in their own oppression.  But the type of woman who participates is what creates recognition for her work.  Greenfield’s collection receives awareness because it is about white women mirroring a culture controlled by white men.  White men define acceptable boundaries for female bodies and behaviors; white women support the male ideal by accepting and acting on the criteria, thereby creating a cyclical relationship, in which white men persistently raise the bar giving women more ideals to attempt to achieve.  The cycle is never-ending because the victims are also the perpetrators—an idea flawlessly identified by Steve Biko(4) who said: “The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” The oppressor owns Greenfield’s mind.  The notion that female oppression affects only white women is utterly false.  Her work narrowly depicts female oppression by assuming only white women and girls are affected by, and address, oppression by the dominant male culture.  Greenfield’s statement that her photographs are as much about the females in them as they are about her is dismally accurate.  Her work depicts issues white women face, choreographed by an affluent female Harvard graduate.  Greenfield’s work offers an infinitesimal glimpse into the cultural issues women encounter, by conveying only the ideas she finds worthy, and offers a dearth of solutions.    

 

Citation

1. Lauren Greenfield, “Lauren Greenfield Photography,” Personal website.  Last updated: unknown. Available from http://photo.box.sk/about.php3?id=164; Internet; accessed 1 Feb 2007.

2. Magdalena Kröner, “Lauren Greenfield: OMC,” Flash Art 37 (Jan/Feb 2004): 115.

3. Thomas McGovern, “Girl Culture: Photographs by Lauren Greenfield,” Afterimage 30 (Mar/Apr 2003): 15.

4. David Barsamian, “Liberating the Mind from Orthodoxies,” An interview with Noam Chomsky.  Date authored unknown. Available from  http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/may01barsamian.htm; Internet; accessed November 2005.

            Steve Biko, was a South African Activist, murdered by apartheid regime while in custody.