Girl Culture | 
 enlarge | Authors: Lauren Greenfield, Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Category: Book
List Price: $40.00
Buy New: $25.65
You Save: $14.35 (36%)
New (5) Used (7) from $10.61
Avg. Customer Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 852898
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 156
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3
Dimensions (in): 12.4 x 10.1 x 0.8
ASIN: B0007PB1T2
Publication Date: October 1, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Renowned photographer Lauren Greenfield has won acclaim and awards for her studies of youth culture. In Girl Culture, she combines a photojournalist’s sense of story with fine-art composition and color to create an astonishing and intelligent exploration of American girls. Her photographs provide a window into the secret worlds of girls’ social lives and private rituals, the dressing room and locker room, as well as the iconic subcultures of the popular clique: cheerleaders, showgirls, strippers, debutantes, actresses, and models. With 100 hypnotic photographs, 20 interviews with the subjects, and an introduction by foremost historian of American girlhood Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Greenfield reveals the exhibitionist nature of modern femininity and how far it has drifted from the feminine ideologies of the past.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
 Lauren Greenfield is wonderful. April 15, 2008
If you feel strongly about the issues, like how the media affects young women, then this is probably a book for you. Lauren Greenfield has captured some very powerful photographs.
Great photographer, amazing book January 27, 2008
Everyone should check out this book. Amazing photographs. The profiles that accompany these pictures are fascinating snippets into these girls lives.
Well put together, diverse, and fascinating. January 31, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I loved this book. My only complaint was that the picture on the cover is a bit risque to make this a good coffee table book. Otherwise it was incredibly interesting, heartwarming and sad. If you're interested in anything from childhood obesity to the effect of sex industries on our culture this is a must read.
 Interesting, but sensationalist. January 12, 2007
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
In very brief terms, this is indicated as an examination of the way today's North American cultural superficiality often results in appearance being the sole, all-encompassing purpose of girls' lives. Indeed, even when one accounts for clear editorial bias, it is successful (and quite disturbing) in expressing to what extent this can be true.
It's funny, therefore, how Greenfield as a photographer almost exclusively chooses attractive girls to photograph. Aside from weight issues, there is almost no examination of how these cultural values impact, say, ugly girls. There's this sense throughout the book that attractive girls, strippers and models, as well as their sex lives, are more interesting to the photographer and her audience than less glamourous types.
It seems as if, in choosing her subjects, Greenfield is affected by the very values she is attempting to expose. After all, who wants to see photographs of ugly girls? Note the fact that the cover of this book, featuring a moderately attractive young blonde exposing her cleavage, almost reads like a clothing ad. Many clothing ads even have similar underlying dark, self-critical elements (see Terry Richardson's advertising work for example). It seems as if this cover is meant to attract readers in the same way that these advertisements do, and appeal to the very desire to see attractive sexualised young females that the book attempts to criticise.
There is a fine line between sensationalism and criticism here, and certainly this book DOES make one look at attractive women differently after reading it. However, though this book does successfully expose some very interesting elements of North American culture, its focus on attractive subjects, sexualised professions and teenage sexuality gives it a very sensationalist overall feel, and tips the scale away from it being truly relevant criticism.
The cover had me December 28, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Just looking into the eyes of the girl on the cover, as she attempts in vain to push her chest up and together, creating cleavage that's not there, I ache for the young women of today. I, too, have done this exact same maneuver (as a younger girl, staring in the mirror; now as a 30-year-old, with the help of a Victoria's Secret push-up...unless I'm working the low-cut, Debra Messing look, which rocks, too!) The photo on the cover made me buy it...the stories inside are as mesmerizing as the accompanying pics.
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