Assignment 2 – The ImageLauren Greenfield

Presentation By James Tighe

Subject MatterThe subject matter that Lauren Greenfield focuses on is people and in some cases a combination of this, with their interaction with objects. To quickly recap on the work of Greenfield, she looks at issues concerning female body image, fashion, wealth, identity and more famously on female adolescence (the coming of age of young women) as seen in her monograph ‘Fast Forward: Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood’ and ‘Thin’.Greenfield documents people like celebrities, youths and everyday people and shows how modern society and pop culture influences them today.

The Approach that I will take? How? Where?One approach which I would like to explore is by documenting a selection of people seeing how they see themselves and how they interact with their surrounding; I might do this in the style of Greenfields documentation of body image and female adolescences and focus primarily on women at their homes or outside.Another approach which I would like to experiment with is by following a single subject, again female, however I will give the body of work a ‘commissioned’ feel by staging a series of photos expressing the pro’s and con’s of pop culture and using a single subject to represent how it could, and influences people.

The Style

Technical AspectsMajority of Greenfield work is known to have a colourful, and saturated look, I’ve noticed that the work of Greenfield is very balanced, and she makes good use of flash and/or light reflection techniques to even tones in the subject allowing for more natural light or experimental. Also with her ‘commissioned’ work she tends to pose the subject in a manner that puts the intended message right into your face, almost exaggerating it. When looking at her images, I find that the high-resolution of each image she takes shows she uses cameras with a medium or high format, or a full-frame format. She also tends to use Canon DSLR cameras and speedlite’s.