Inside Lauren Greenfield’s Chilling Exploration of Social Media Culture

Dazed Magazine

May 20, 2025

by Sarah Moroz

Inside Lauren Greenfield’s chilling exploration of social media culture

The LA artist’s new exhibition, Social Studies, takes a deep dive into the algorithmic rabbit holes of pornography, eating disorders, beauty trends and more

Incisive documentarian Lauren Greenfield is renowned for her photographic monographs and probing documentary features that scrutinise American contemporary norms, be they capitalistic fervour, body dysmorphia or youth culture. New York Magazine described her gaze as having “a sort of gentle, ironic detachment”, but she is fully implicated in her work and palpably empathetic to her subjects.

From her 1997 photo book Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood, which documented the unbridled lives of LA adolescents, to Girl Culture (2002), which examined the trials of young womanhood, and 2012’s documentary The Queen of Versailles, which followed the story of a woman with grandiose plans to build the biggest house in North America, modelled on the actual Versailles. In all of them, Greenfield offers a compassionate but penetrating perspective on popular culture.

Having grown up in LA herself, Greenfield revisits her early stomping grounds for her first television series, Social Studies, which debuted in 2024. The show follows a cohort of relentlessly online high school students over a school year as they’re being “perceived” by their peers. Now, as an upcoming photo exhibition accompanying the series is about to open at Fahey Klein Gallery, we spoke with Greenfield over Zoom and discussed phone addiction, the benefits of slowing down the pace of social media, and whether it’s possible for teens to feel they even exist if they’re not on social media.

How do these still images work as a complement to Social Studies as a series? Are they their own thread of storytelling, or is it all of a piece? 

Lauren Greenfield: The subject is very much the same as the narrative series, thinking about how young people are affected by social media. But both the narrative series for Social Studies and the exhibition are departures for me, process-wise and craft-wise, from everything I’ve done before. 

At the end of it, I realised that I also wanted to do an exhibition that made conceptual work out of my findings. So the exhibition is a mix of documentary photographs of the characters, but also these large-scale ‘typologies’ where I mixed trends of similar things that I was seeing everywhere in social media. I was really interested in this thing that happens on social media where everybody feels like they’re so individual, but they’re all doing the exact same thing. 

I wanted the exhibition to deconstruct the imagery even more, decontextualise it off of social media and transform it – from something that’s going by so fast, that we really can’t take in the semiotics of – to something that’s not only still, but large. It’s taking what's little and making it monumental. 

Portraits are a recognisable genre of photography, but these typologies you wouldn't normally see in a gallery. This hybrid choice – is it informational? Aesthetic? 

Lauren Greenfield: I think that there is a limit to what vérité can tell about this world. Ultimately, you need to go into the world, and that’s why I dove in and animated the phone. This is a world of user-generated imagery, and I think that’s really important to represent. My documentary images here serve the purpose of giving context to this other work. You see there is a human on the other side, who’s being deeply emotionally affected. Their identities are formed by what they're seeing. So it gives it that context of what it means, and for whom.

How do you whittle material down from 2000 hours? What is your editing process for something so unwieldy?

Lauren Greenfield: This was my first series. There are five episodes, it’s five hours, and I was really intrigued and also overwhelmed at times by that opportunity, because it allowed me to chase a lot of different threads. 

I love the series because it allowed me time in the field and time with the subjects. That’s always the most important part of my process, because gaining access is the hardest and most crucial part. I have to have trust to film real lives, real events unfolding, difficult subjects, and then this ultimate added act of trust of sharing phone content, which is the equivalent of sharing your diary. 

Once we were doing it, I realised that it was this very unique archive that we were collecting of this material that young people were seeing, that we were able to really look at, and I wanted to analyse it. My process was me, with usually four editors, and we’re all working on figuring out the stories, putting together the narrative pieces of the puzzle. It’s chronological, but it’s also thematic. It became very clear, because of the kids’ stories that I was following, but also because of the repetition of what they were saying, that there were certain undeniable themes I needed to cover: eating disorders, suicidal ideation, the way young people learn about sexuality, and algorithmic rabbit holes. Some were coming up again and again, even some positive things – creative ways young people were being makers, finding affinity groups online. But ultimately, it really also this huge lack of connection and communication and young people are really yearning for going back to a time before we had this. 

A lot of my work was really about the early loss of innocence in a media-saturated society. It’s so extreme with social media, in the sense that, like, third graders are seeing violent pornography. In fact, one of the early inspirations for this project was, I remember talking to some mums at school when my son was probably about 16, and their kids were like 13 – girls –and the mums were talking about how they all shave all their pubes. I was just thinking of the influence of pornography. 

There was this article in The New York Times in 2023 where a journalist was documenting 13-year-old girls and their phones, positing that girls more than boys were affected by social media. I was wondering if you found that to be true?

Lauren Greenfield: I think you probably see more damage to girls than to boys in this work. But I think that there’s a lot of stuff going on with boys now. I noticed with my own boys that – instead of things getting better for girls – boys are also being objectified. When my first movie, Thin, about eating disorders, came out in 2006, at that time, there were not even any eating disorder facilities for male body image. I remember this young man sending me photos of himself struggling with an eating disorder, and it was just really heartbreaking. He eventually died. I think it’s really an undercovered story. 

I think girls have gotten more comfortable talking about it. I think the social media age has put a lot of fear into boys and we see that in the show – boys getting cancelled, dealing with college pressure and keeping it in – in a way that some of the female characters don’t. In Social Studies, I think the male characters are as important as the female characters in terms of telling us what's going on. Certainly, in mental health and suicidal ideation, it’s not gendered. And the thing about eating disorders that I learned when I made the film is: part of it is body image, but part of it is a coping mechanism, like drugs or alcohol, and so what’s underneath that is not gendered. But because there’s been a hyper-focus on girls’ bodies, we see girls’ bodies as the canvas for that playing out more often than we see boys’ bodies. But I think that the malaise and isolation from social media are felt as powerfully by the boys as by the girls.

If you are immersed in online culture, it’s overwhelmingly toxic. But if you abstain or don’t engage, you’re uncomfortably excluded. It seems like an impossible riddle. Is there a solution?

Lauren Greenfield: I've really come to a different idea about this as a result of doing this project. I go in very non-judgmental. What I came to at the end of this was that it’s a false paradigm, that it’s not a binary: should we live with it? Should we live without it? The impossibility of that is best expressed by Jonathan, who says it’s our lifeline, but it’s also a loaded gun. How can you have a lifeline that’s also a loaded gun—and have that in the hands of young people? 

I came to this project because I would often get into battles with my youngest son about screen time, and blame him for being on it so much. I think a lot of adults are like, ‘What’s wrong with the kids today? They’re on their screens all the time.’ But it’s like blaming an opiate addict for their own addiction. These algorithms, these apps, are made to do exactly what they do, which is maximum engagement with no concern about the consequences. We know that the tech companies don’t have concerns about the consequences, and are aware of them, because we’ve seen the TikTok research leaked, and we know that Facebook also had research from the whistleblowers. This is a paradigm that was engineered by humans to do exactly what it’s doing for the purpose of profit. There are a lot of people making money from it, not just the tech companies, but also the brands that advertise on it and profit from the engagement. I’ve given up on government and tech companies in our new political situation. It’s a dangerous situation that we’ve put ourselves in, where we are the product, rather than paying for the product. 

I think there’s no question that there are positives when you go off of it, but it’s got to be a collective action, or it’s too punitive for one person. The new existential question at the end of the show: do you exist if you’re not on social media? The answer is no, people forget about you, and that’s too punitive for teenagers who are at a stage in life where they’re meant to learn how to socialise and make friends and find their identity. 

The way you describe your own education is fascinating. You were educated to be a critical thinker, and social media now just seems so ambient and not deconstructed. Media literacy is essential, yet overlooked.

Lauren Greenfield: It’s why I’m doing the museum show, so you could actually walk through space and reflect in a more contemplative way. I think the kids in the show are amazing. In the show, you hear them tell you the problems. But they’re also subjects in their own lives, dealing with all this stuff at the same time, and knowing it does not make you immune to it. I feel like that’s been a throughline in my work, but here it really comes through so strongly.

Lauren Greenfield’s Social Studies is running at Fahey Klein in Los Angeles 22 May – 5 July, 2025.