Life on ‘Fast Forward’

The capital of pop has a profound effect on those who must grow up here; image, money and violence hold a grip on youth culture like an addictive drug as children soak up the examples set by the adults and media around them.

L.A. native Lauren Greenfield proves this relationship better than many traditional social scientists could. She spent more than four years photographing the children and young adults of Los Angeles and came up with an extraordinary collection published this month, “Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood” (Knopf / Melcher).

Many of the 79 photographs are also featured in two European exhibits this month and in shows at L.A.’s Stephen Cohen Gallery and the I.C.P. in New York. In conjunction with her I.C.P. opening, she received the Infinity Award for young photographers.

Greenfield, 30 and already at the top of her field with photos printed in everything from the New Yorker to U.S. News & World Report, opens windows on young lives, documenting their hunger for image and starvation for character.

In “Fast Forward,” a 13-year-old girl does tummy crunches with her personal trainer. An 18-year-old woman gets a bend in her nose shaved off by a plastic surgeon. An 8-year-old paints a teardrop tattoo below his big, brown left eye--copying the symbol hard-core gangsters use to signify jail time.

The photojournalist completed the project with the help of National Geographic, which awarded her a grant in 1993 that covered stipend, expenses and film. She toured the vast social and geographic landscape of Southern California--capturing gangsters and debutantes alike--and still found gravity around the theme of Hollywood’s profound influence on coming of age in L.A.

“It’s that time when they’re looking to clothes, cars and other kids to find an identity,” she says. “And in L.A., it’s raised to a level of life and death for some kids.”

Greenfield grew up in Venice, the daughter of UCLA professors. She graduated from the elite private school Crossroads in Santa Monica, living and studying in France during her sophomore year.

Six years later, she took a bachelor’s degree in visual anthropology from Harvard, where she was able to study in nine countries as part of her course work. After working on photo projects in France and Mexico for nearly four years, she returned to California in 1992, only to be intrigued by the visual possibilities.

“I thought, wouldn’t I be better at something that I had more understanding of?” Greenfield says. “I had been away from L.A. for eight years, so I came to it with fresh eyes.”

In fact, she originally set out to document the sometimes ostentatious, always fashion-conscious world of her alma mater.

“Very early on in the project, I was on the campus of Crossroads,” she recalls. “I said I was doing young people in L.A. Some of the students held out cash and said money is what it’s all about. When I printed the photographs, I realized they were holding $100 bills.”

These images--children being raised in Beverly Hills hotels, bar mitzvahs with go-go dancers as entertainment--can feel like fantastic glimpses into foreign worlds.

“I think it’s such an amazing piece of sociological work in her own backyard,” says Gerd Ludwig, a National Geographic staff photographer and Greenfield mentor. “That’s why she can go so deep--because she knows it.

“A lot of us photographers wish to go off to exotic places, without realizing we can go to exotic places without leaving our doorstep.”

It may seem that Greenfield has turned a scornful eye toward her past. But her work has the ring of truth. She spent long hours with her subjects and captured them in what she says is everyday life. She doesn’t intend her body of work to be judgmental--as is much of the mainstream media’s reflections of the young.

“I don’t think my job is to be critical,” she says. “I don’t think the kids are wrong for trying to survive in the culture we live in. Like Lindsay getting the nose job. It was something that was really making her unhappy and hurting her self-esteem. I think she was reasonable.

“We need to think about what kind of culture we live in to make someone so unhappy about her image.”

The broadcast center for pop culture, from movies to gangsta rap, often happens to be Los Angeles. And the kids around town, from the Westside to the inner city, seem to be affected by the strong signals all the same.

Greenfield found that image and money were paramount in the poorer sections of the city as well. Rather than get a nose job, a kid on the Eastside might get a gang tattoo.

She describes how one of her favorite subjects and friends, photography student Ennis Beley, then 15, grew up in South-Central lusting after $135 basketball shoes and $50,000 Lexus cars.

“He taught me about the kind of materialism that was around him,” she says. “He hated my car--a Honda Civic.”

And while Los Angeles may be an obvious example of the mass media’s effect on the young, it is by no means alone. Greenfield notes that white kids in the Midwestern heartland (or even Beverly Hills) dress like gangsters, while young people in Paris have taken to “bombing”--graffiti writing.

“Different kids are sharing a same culture,” she says. “International youth culture is exported--and everyone looks to California.”

Greenfield worked hard to capture these California kids, shooting reams of film and using a minimum of flash so as to be unobtrusive on subjects and the resulting art. She wrote stories about some subjects and allowed others to help shape their own testimonials. Author Richard Rodriguez and director Carrie Fisher contributed essays on growing up in Los Angeles too.

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The project did not come without hardships.

While photographing a benefit carwash--held, ironically, to pay for the funeral of a slain gang member--Greenfield crouched behind her car as rivals drove up and sprayed the scene with bullets. (No one was hit.)

And during a follow-up photo shoot with a gangster she had documented two years before, she says she felt threatened as the now-18-year-old’s dialogue wandered illogically and he talked about how he could explode with rage at any time and kill even her.

After some earlier shots for the project were published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine in 1992, some of her subjects wrote a letter to the editor to complain.

“We were all duped by Greenfield,” a group of six teens wrote. “We did not intend to be part of a deceptive, inaccurate exploitation piece that portrayed us as a bunch of rich kids with little if any brains or integrity.”

Greenfield later would expand her quest for youth photos to other, more diverse parts of the city.

To be sure, Greenfield has a disarmingly kind demeanor and seemed at home with teenagers during her recent L.A. gallery opening. A couple of ex-Beverly Hills High School classmates of some of her subjects were there and vouched for the accuracy of her portrayals.

Jessica Travers, now 21 and a photography student herself, pointed to the book’s beach-cruising cover shot and said: “That’s the identity kids in our high school were striving to achieve: cars, clothes, image.”

Greenfield has made more than a few friends along the way. Among her strongest bonds was with Beley, who was 12 when she met him, shortly after she started “Fast Forward.” His photography stood out in a collection of pictures by children and teenagers--published in a poignant book, “Picture L.A.: Landmarks of a New Generation”--that Greenfield coordinated. And one of Beley’s photos was displayed at the home of Vice President Al Gore.

Beley was gunned down in a gang-related killing in June, a month before his 16th birthday, as he walked down a South-Central street wearing a bright red sweatshirt. He had become something of a media darling, telling reporters for the BBC covering the aftermath of the 1992 riots that he wouldn’t live to see 25.

Greenfield dedicated “Fast Forward” to his memory. “It just reminded me of this idea of fast forward,” she says, “of kids being old before their time.”