When American documentarian Lauren Greenfield’s debut photo book Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood was published in 1997, it captured the spirit of an era – one that was dominated by the shiny aspirational force of MTV. It also set the trajectory for Greenfield’s career tracing culture at the sharp edge of teenage intensity, through both documentary photography and film.
Girl Culture (published in 2016) was the culmination of Greenfield’s subsequent work documenting and interviewing teenage girls coming of age as they navigated issues to do with body image and a sexualised culture. Her latest work, a five-part documentary called Social Studies, revisits young people at that same life stage, but with the added complication of social media.
This year was also a milestone for Irish photographer Eimear Lynch, whose own debut book Girls Night was published this spring. Lynch travelled around Ireland to photograph groups of girls immersed in the ritual of dressing up and applying their make-up together before heading out to discos. Drawing on her own memories of sharing clothes with her friends and gathering around a single mirror propped up on a bedside table to do makeup, Lynch spent several months in 2023 and 2024 documenting how this rite of passage has evolved.
Both image-makers are also popular in the fashion world; Greenfield’s campaign for Balenciaga’s Le City (a bag that came to prominence via 2000s Hollywood it-girls, very much of the Generation Wealth and Fast Forward universe) dropped last week, and Lynch has captured models backstage at shows for the likes of Miu Miu and Simone Rocha.
In the following conversation, both image-makers discuss how they came to establish their photographic voice, and how their subject matter has evolved over time.
Lauren Greenfield: I was an intern at National Geographic, and I learned colour there. That is where I began to establish my style and started to play with using colour and flash. My first assignment was about this Mayan village in Mexico, but I didn’t have a deep understanding of what I was shooting and I was largely limited to women’s spaces in my access. When I had my final slide show at National Geographic they killed the story. They said, ‘We really want to support you as a photographer but we’re not publishing this story. Is there a project you want to do?’ I talked about wanting to go back and photograph young people in Los Angeles, and they said they’d fund it.
Ironically, once I did the project, they also didn’t publish it because it was too edgy. At that time National Geographic liked looking at other cultures but didn’t want to look at American culture, the sexualisation of girls, kids growing up quickly, and materialism. There was a critical perspective that wasn’t really part of the National Geographic aesthetic at that time. So they ended up giving me back the material, which was a huge blessing in disguise, and I made my first book, Fast Forward: Growing up in the Shadow of Hollywood, and had my first show at the ICP New York. That was really the beginning of putting my voice out there. And I think that’s what led to me spend five years on Girl Culture. It was really about how the body had become the primary expression of identity for girls and women.
And the reason I’ve been thinking about that again lately is because of my new work, Social Studies. The first time I was looking at how young people were influenced by the media, but at that time, the media was television, movies, and music, and particularly MTV. This time, it’s social media.
Eimear Lynch: I watched Social Studies, and between that and Girl Culture, it seems like a lot of the themes and the pressures on the girls are still so similar, but with Social Studies, it’s a lot more intense. Do you think that teenagers are wiser and they question all of that a bit more than when you were doing Girl Culture?
“The first time I was looking at how young people were influenced by the media, but at that time, the media was television, movies, and music, and particularly MTV. This time, it’s social media” – Lauren Greenfield
LG: In a way it didn’t feel different, but it was more intense. Everything was amplified but there is also a lot of awareness. When I did Fast Forward, I interviewed this kid named Adam, who was 13, and he had this really over-the-top bar mitzvah where he had go-go girls dancing with the kids in a nightclub, and he said in this interview, “Money ruins me and I feel like money ruins kids.” And then he goes on to talk about a $70,000 bar mitzvah. I learned something then that really influenced the rest of my work and came back in Social Studies, which is that the kids are actually really aware and uncomfortable about the pressure, but that doesn’t make it so it doesn’t affect them.
In Social Studies, a lot of the kids also talk about how they want to get off social media, how they feel all the pressures, and they really deconstruct them for the audience, but in that case, it’s actually an addiction. I think there is more awareness, but the awareness is not new.
EL: I wonder if the new awareness is actually just making people a lot more unhappy. I grew up just before social media. I didn’t have a phone when I was a teenager. I was lucky enough to miss that. I think I got social media when I was 18, but I think when I was a teenager I was quite blissfully unaware of patriarchal pressures.
Now, I think kids punish themselves because they know that some things they’re doing are wrong. They are trying to get off the internet and they’re constantly being told they can do better. Whereas when I was younger, we just got on with things, and we were very, very naive but blissfully unaware.
LG: I really like this picture of yours, of the girl in the orange dress with the cutouts, with the three girls holding the phone. It’s almost like you have two things that I’ve seen in your work: one that’s like a kind of innocence, it’s a more rural kind of style, and then this feeling of the world coming in with the disco pictures.
EL: It’s interesting you said the world coming in because that’s kind of what I felt like. It wasn’t like the girls decided, ‘Now I’m gonna dress sexually.’ It was just like, this is how life works: we wear our school uniform, our mum buys our clothes and then we reach 13 and we get to wear the bodycon dress. And it was the same when I was that age as well. We didn’t fully have an awareness of what we were actually doing, it was just a rite of passage.
What I tried to portray in the photo is that, although there are a lot of negative connotations towards that, there was just such an excitement to finally get to wear that bodycon cut-out £5 dress. Even though there’s a lot of pressure on women and their bodies, we can still have fun and we can still be excited for it. We can take hours doing our make-up, and that’s the best part of the night; it doesn’t all have to be stress and comparison.
LG: There’s probably a little bit of a generational difference in that. In Social Studies, Sydney talks about dressing sexy as a form of expression, and there was actually an argument that she had with her mom that I didn’t end up using in the film because I had too much material, but I really love this dialogue where her mom is like, ‘I don’t want you to go out dressed like that.’ And she’s like, ‘No, mum, it’s self-expression.’
From my perspective as a feminist, I kind of challenge whether that is actually empowering, instead of reading or working, or doing sports, or something that will actually propel them to a new phase of life. I definitely agree with the girl bonding that happens, and I think those connections are really important, and in some ways, girls have those deep connections because of that time. But I also just worry about the brain drain, time drain, and the financial drain of what those kinds of extracurricular activities give in the end.
EL: That’s interesting because when I started to take my career seriously as a photographer, I started to dress more masculine. I wore less makeup, I cared less about my appearance because I was aware that it was taking up far too much time. I stopped comparing myself to other people because I was like, ‘Photography is a very male-dominated industry and if I’m going to be successful I need to cut that out so that I can focus on my work.’ Over the last few years, I’ve been mainly wearing my boyfriend’s clothes and I forgot about my girliness. With Girls Night, I was trying to get back in touch with the girliness because I think it can be fun.
Before a night out, the girls in the book were spending an hour or two doing makeup, but they were also chatting to each other and listening to good music, and talking about music. What I found interesting is that they weren’t really talking about boys, which was a lot of what we spoke about when I was a teenager. I do think there is a kind of beauty within that pressure, as it gives us a lot of time to be together and connect, whereas the boys would all just arrive at the same time after being in separate houses and then go home to separate houses. It creates really good bonds for friendship.
LG: I loved what you said about focusing on your photography and how that changed you because I feel like that’s the coming-of-age process that I felt in Social Studies – that the antidote to the 24/7 comparison was finding your voice and using your voice.
Is Girls Night your first book? We have to do a book swap.
EL: Yeah, I would love to. I was living in Paris before I did Girls Night and I put all my stuff into storage. I bought [Greenfield’s book] Girl Culture when I was in Paris and brought it back to Ireland – it was the only photo book that I had while working on Girls Night because all my other stuff was in storage in London. I felt it was a very good guiding light for me while I was figuring out what a book entails.
“Nothing has changed apart from [the fact that] now people have phones and they’re on the dancefloor filming TikToks, but everything is still the same. The style is still the same, I wore that same bodycon cut-out dress” – Eimear Lynch
LG: It’s amazing that it’s not that different. So much time has passed, but on the other hand, I feel like the imagery and the themes have not changed much.
EL: Yeah, that’s what I found. I went to teen discos. That was very much a world that I knew, and I was very surprised that they’re the exact same from 15 years before, when I went. Nothing has changed apart from [the fact that] now people have phones and they’re on the dancefloor filming TikToks, but everything is still the same. The style is still the same, I wore that same bodycon cut-out dress. The only thing that has changed is that my friend and I used to wear heels and pretend to know how to walk in them, whereas now teenagers are smarter and they wear trainers.
Social Studies by Lauren Greenfield is streaming now. Girls Night by Eimear Lynch is published by IDEA, and is out now.