Lauren Greenfield: Storyteller
Lauren Greenfield’s provocative photos spike the pages of The New Yorker, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar with her own brand of social commentary. Her work also appears in American Photo and the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography. But Greenfield is more than a crafter of arresting images. She’s a storyteller, drawn to issues of youth culture, as evidenced by her books, “Girl Culture” and “Fast Forward.”
Now Greenfield is taking her photography in new directions. “Thin,” her first film, is a feature-length documentary about eating disorders. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and aired on HBO. But Greenfield had more to say about eating disorders than even a film could convey. So she has also produced a book and a DVD of the same title, as well as a traveling exhibition, multimedia segments, and a lively forum on her new website.
With her still and video cameras and her Apple hardware and software, Greenfield is experiencing a new creative freedom. “Apple allows you to have all these tools at your fingertips so you can use them to tell stories,” reflects Greenfield. “For some, film works better; for others, it’s photography; and for others still, multimedia. The great thing with Apple is, you can tell the story however you choose.”
Greenfield is fired up by the palette at her disposal. “It’s really inspiring to use all these different media because they all fit together so seamlessly. I can organize my photos in Aperture, add sound and video, edit in Final Cut Pro, make a disc with DVD Studio Pro, put new media on my website. I just love taking so much into my own hands.”
Dying to Be Thin
If the mere numbers are shocking — one in seven American women has an eating disorder, and 20 percent of those die from it — the stories in “Thin” bring the human reality into painfully clear focus. The film centers on four women undergoing treatment at the Renfrew Center in Florida, where Greenfield gained unusually open access to patients and staff.
“One of the biggest challenges of making this film was getting that access, especially in light of how delicate the eating disorder population is,” she explains. “These women have big issues around trust, and many of them are survivors of trauma. I was aware that we were going in there as image-makers, with women who already have body image issues and for whom the media can play a triggering role.”
Sensitive to her subjects’ fragility, the filmmaker gently earned their full cooperation. “The girls want people to know what it’s like to have an eating disorder,” says Greenfield. “That’s why they agreed to do the film.”
Her camera follows the women through their most vulnerable moments as the director reveals the destructive extremes they go to in pursuit of an ideal form that’s dangerously out of sync both with their own reality (most of the stick-thin women perceive themselves as fat) and with normal conceptions of beauty.
Workflow Flexibility
The book that accompanies “Thin” is Greenfield’s third, but it’s the first in which her photographic workflow was centered on her Mac platform. Her photos were all-digital from the outset, and color correction was done in her studio and at her prepress firm in Seattle. “Because they’re Mac-based,” explains Greenfield, “iocolor made ColorSync profiles customized to the press profile at our plant in China, which was able to produce accurate proofs for me to judge.”
When a printing error occurred, the Mac afforded Greenfield the flexibility to correct it before it was too late. “We did a matte laminate for the cover, and there was a color shift — it made the image too red,” she says. By the time the mistake was discovered, the cover was on the press. “Normally at that point we’d be screwed,” she says. “But iocolor made the correction digitally and posted a new file to an FTP site. The press in China picked it up, rolled it, and we approved the new color. Being on the Mac allowed us to avoid having to reprint 20,000 covers.”
A stickler for color accuracy, Greenfield notes, “This book was a breakthrough for me, because we got much better reproduction than we did on my last two books. I’m so happy with the way the colors turned out.”
First-Time Director
To make “Thin,” Greenfield hired DP Amanda Micheli. Greenfield shot second camera herself, ultimately generating about ten percent of the film. Editor Kate Amend used Final Cut Pro to edit more than 200 hours to a feature-length documentary. “We were able to learn Final Cut Pro ourselves,” says Greenfield. “It’s totally user friendly.”
© Alana Goldstein
Soon after the film’s release Greenfield had up to 15,000 people hitting her website daily. She wanted to make available some of her outtakes but was on a limited budget. So she quickly regrouped. “Since we knew how to use Final Cut Pro, we decided to cut those scenes in our studio, where we could do it inexpensively.”
