Pictures as narrative
“I was fascinated by this idea of an impoverished elite,” Lauren Greenfield told a Harvard crowd last Thursday. The photographer and documentary filmmaker was referring to her College thesis, a series of intimate images that captured the daily lives of French aristocrats who had lost their fortunes. Greenfield ’87 explained that the notion of the once-rich struggling to find their way resonated with her and her experience growing up Los Angeles, where glitz and glamour were the norm and a person’s worth was less about deeds than income. “Class was defined exclusively by money.” Greenfield’s powerful senior project helped launch her career. The work drew the attention of National Geographic, where she became an intern, her first step in a career that has included work with The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Le Monde, The Guardian, and Vanity Fair. In 2006, Greenfield made her first feature-length documentary. “Thin,” about patients in...