Lauren Greenfield is a photographer and a filmmaker, she tells BJP. Her most recent work, Fashion Show, produced for New York Magazine, is a multimedia piece that mixes both still and moving images. She talks with Olivier Laurent about her work and the reasons that made her quit the VII Photo Agency and follow her husband, Frank Evers, at the Institute for Artist Management.

BJP: Why did you want to do Fashion Show?
Lauren Greenfield: I went there solely for the still photography. I was on assignment for the New York Magazine’s Portfolio and that was really my priority, but I had a really amazing opportunity to photograph in depth the fashion shows, we received fantastic access to the shows, which I had never photographed before. Fashion has been a theme in my work in a lot of different ways – whether it influences young people or grown women or the way advertising gets in our heads or the way fashion and fashion models affect body image, etc. I’ve also produced fashion shoots for magazines, but I’ve always tried to introduce social commentary into that. So, for me it was exciting opportunity to get to be behind the scenes and I think that eventually I will some kind of book of the fashion work, but for now it was fun for me. But the film allows me to architect my own story. I think this is the narrative arc and the idea in that piece was to take all the fashion shows and make them into one fashion show. It was a little bit my experience photographing it – there’s so much repetition. Every day you’re at a fashion show there are certain parts of it that are always the same. I’ve often looked at the negative side of fashion – how much it cost, what it costs us, as women. This was also a chance for m to celebrate the expressive part of fashion, because I’ve always been interested in that part too. So, in the end, I did a lot of photography and a little bit of video and then collaborated with a very talented editor who took my story and came up with a non-verbal way of telling it.
 
BJP: Do you consider yourself a photographer or a filmmaker?
Lauren Greenfield: I’m a photographer and I’m a filmmaker. I didn’t use to introduce myself as a filmmaker, but Thin was a feature film, so after I made that I was a first-time filmmaker, and then I made a second film and now I’m now working on a third film. The truth of the matter is that when I was in college, I studied filmmaking and photography, and I actually wanted to be a filmmaker, but at that time you couldn’t just go out to be a filmmaker. I did try to go that route, and my husband Frank said: ‘Do your photography because that’s what you’re good at it, and if you do that, you’ll be able to do anything.’ I don’t know how he knew that then, but it turned out to be truth, because 14 years later, when I brought Girl Culture to HBO, they trusted me on the basis of my photography. The great thing about photography is that you can use it as an amazing sketch pad, you can go do a project not really knowing what you will get. It a very different process to do a whole feature film – it’s much more expensive. I think there is this wonderful freedom about photography. Also, my photography projects can be very broad. I can take a photo of one person in Beverly Hills and of someone else in Dubai and I can make connections that tell a story. In films, my work has been very different. If I want to make a story, it has to be about one person or one family, so it’s a very different story that I’m telling. The themes are often the same, but it’s a different medium. I think we live in an interesting time when there are a lot of different creative outlets and tools available to us. For some people it can be overwhelming right now, but what artists should follow their own voices and use their own tools. Not everybody has to shoot films, do multimedia or use digital.
 
BJP: The position of women and girls in today’s commercial-centred society permeates a lot in your work. Why this interest?
Lauren Greenfield: I think that a lot of the themes in my work have been there since the beginning and each of the projects develops a certain part of it. Right now I’m working on a new body of work that relates to the commercial side of it, but not the girl part of it. I work in a very organic way. When one project finishes, it’s the beginning of the next one. With Fast Forward I started working with kids growing-up in Los Angeles and the idea of materialism was very central, as well as the way we’re affected by popular culture and advertising. But while I was doing that, I realised that girls have a very special relationship to that, and I think that’s where I could bring my own experience as I also grew up in Los Angeles. For Girl Culture, I could bring my own experience as a woman, even though I tried to keep a very open mind, and, as a journalist, talk about what I actually see and what I actually hear from the subjects. Thin was not commercial, but was really about mental illness. But that mental illness, I think, is important because it tells us about the times we live in. I don’t think this eating disorder is related to fashion or to magazines. I think it’s a very serious mental illness that goes well beyond that, but  I do think there’s a relationship between how the body has become this important expression for women and this kind of judging ground and battleground for all of these different kind of struggles. So I think it’s not a coincidence that we’re seeing great numbers of this particular pathology. So I guess there is some kind of intersection between my own experience and what I feel is important as my own person and what I observe in the world in a sociological point of view.
 
BJP: Beyond the fact that Frank Evers is your husband, what pushed you to join the Institute for Artist Management?
Lauren Greenfield: The thing about my relationship with Frank – we’ve been together for 24 years – many of the things I’ve had available in my career has been thanks to his management. Even though he worked in the film business and in the video business, he always was my manager and helped me make creative decisions. He’s always encouraged me to focus on my personal work over everything else, and has architected my cross-platform work for the last eight years and Girl Culture. I kind of spend my time doing research and taking the pictures, and Frank thinks about the big picture and how people are going to see my work, how we’re going to get them out to the world for people to see. So, I think he has a talent doing that and can apply it to a lot of other people, not just to me. What I really like about the Institute is its quest to break down the boundaries between different mediums, while nurturing personal work. And I’m also very interested in creating a place that nurtures strong female vision, I think that’s something that needs to be there, and I’m really excited about how international our agency is and how it’s supporting strong voices.

For more on Lauren Greenfield, visit www.laurengreenfield.com.