Photographer Lauren Greenfield was rummaging through approximately half a million photos she’d taken over the past 25 years. The images chronicle the Western world’s spiraling obsession with consumption and celebrity, part of her extensive project “Generation Wealth.” Specifically, Greenfield was looking for potentially overlooked connections to help round out her visual story, which starts with MTV-crazed teenagers and ends somewhere around the election of President Donald Trump.
Greenfield zeroed in on a photo she had previously disregarded, showing a group of bored looking preteens huddled in the hallway of a Los Angeles private school dance, wearing ripped jeans, T-shirts and plaid button-downs. When she took the photo in 1992, Greenfield recognized two of the partygoers as the daughters of O.J. Simpson’s lawyer, but didn’t think much of it. Looking back, she realized she’d unwittingly captured Kim and Kourtney Kardashian, two individuals who embody the very dreams of status and spectacle she’d spent decades exploring.