• Please use real names.

    Greetings to all who have registered to OPF and those guests taking a look around. Please use real names. Registrations with fictitious names will not be processed. REAL NAMES ONLY will be processed

    Firstname Lastname

    Register

    We are a courteous and supportive community. No need to hide behind an alia. If you have a genuine need for privacy/secrecy then let me know!
  • Welcome to the new site. Here's a thread about the update where you can post your feedback, ask questions or spot those nasty bugs!

Photographic Gems of Our Times From The Web Photo show in LA - ‘Generation Wealth’ by Lauren Greenfield

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
I have seen this on another forum, I thought that L.A. residents might be interested. In any case, the pictures available on the web site are interesting.


America exports its addiction to bling across the globe; Lauren Greenfield captures it with her camera

900x506

Photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield's "Generation Wealth," at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Century City, is the culmination of 25 years of work. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

Lauren Greenfield recently stopped at Target with her 10-year-old son. The idea was to grab a coffee and use the restroom. Before she knew it, she had a cart full of stuff, including a $50 jar of anti-aging face cream. Her son made her put it back.

Greenfield tells the story while sitting on a couch inside the Annenberg Space for Photography in L.A. days before the opening of her solo show, “Generation Wealth,” which runs through Aug. 13. She wears studious black-framed glasses, a black jacket and a breezy lavender blouse, looking very much out of step with the gold-plated luxury in the frames around her.

Greenfield has devoted the last 25 years to documenting the hollow promise of rampant consumer culture and what she calls “the influence of affluence.” The point of her Target anecdote: If someone like her still falls prey to the carefully engineered impulse to buy, buy, buy, imagine how vulnerable the rest of us are.

“I’ve always been inspired by my own urges,” says Greenfield, sipping on a large coffee. “If you go into a department store, you’re going to want stuff. I hope people come to this exhibit and see themselves. I hope they don’t say, ‘Who are these people?’ ”

The people in the 195 prints on display represent seemingly every rung on the socio-economic ladder. They are strippers in Magic City, a club in Atlanta; teens getting a nose job in Hollywood; A-list celebrities partying in Beverly Hills; 6-year-old beauty pageant stars in Oxnard; kids doing sexy dances at fat camp in the Catskills; the new rich in China and Russia; families across the U.S. and Ireland that lost everything in the financial crash of 2008; and much more.



‘Generation Wealth’ by Lauren Greenfield
Where: Annenberg Space for Photography, 2000 Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles
When: Through Aug. 13, closed Mondays and Tuesdays
Info: (213) 403-3000, www.annenbergphotospace.org
 

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
The show is literally 8minutes from my home! Will go explore!

8 minutes by car and about half an hour walking, yes. This project about consumer culture looks fascinating from the pictures on the website, but maybe I am not the right public. I find Versace particularly ugly and I despise shopping, because it is rare that I find something I feel like buying. I actually often wonder who buys all that junk.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
8 minutes by car and about half an hour walking, yes. This project about consumer culture looks fascinating from the pictures on the website, but maybe I am not the right public. I find Versace particularly ugly and I despise shopping, because it is rare that I find something I feel like buying. I actually often wonder who buys all that junk.

Jerome,

"Shopping" here in LA-LA Land is not for the ordinary needs of people to get necessities like groceries, medicines, clothes for the kids or gas for the car. Rather "Shopping" is more akin to a sport participation like gathering one's friends on a Sunday morning with beer and pizza-hungry friends to absorb and cheer every move my their favorite sports team and exclude any news of the day that CNN, BBC, The Guardian, Le Monde or even Fox News would find significant!

"shopping" is an activity the women, in that habit, pursue as part of their woman to woman bonding, as if they were playing tennis or a game of cards. The advantage of "shopping" as a group sport is that one does not need to "train", "diet" or be "ranked" to participate. One does not even need to have a lot of spare cash. After all, one can purchase any fabulous offering and then return the next day or week for a full refund. A common practice is to buy some blouses for example and then return to get instead a more expensive dress where the "difference" is not very signicant. So these "shoppers" feel that they have been very smart and even spending wisely.

As women shop, so they accumulate kudos from their friend of that day, with whom they compare their "winnings" over lunch at the department store restaurant. This is equivalent to a man taking off a we essay afternoon with a colleague for a round of golf and 2 tequila lunch at the club restaurant.

Whereas golf for men brings no shame, with women's shopping, however, this is often a secretive activity. In some families, the purchases are hidden from the husband as the woman feels vulnerable to criticism and ridicule for gathering "stuff" they really don't need.

Only rarely do husbands accompany the "shoppers". This is a woman's sport!

If goods couldn't be routinely returned, then it would lose most of its players!

Asher
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I plan to visit later this week.

ANNENBERG SPACE FOR PHOTOGRAPHY
Wed - Sun: 11am - 6pm
Mon - Tue: Closed

DOCUMENTARY SCREENINGS
Screenings of The Wealth Project begin every 30 minutes, with the last one starting at 5PM.

Asher
 

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
"shopping" is an activity the women, in that habit, pursue as part of their woman to woman bonding, as if they were playing tennis or a game of cards. The advantage of "shopping" as a group sport is that one does not need to "train", "diet" or be "ranked" to participate. One does not even need to have a lot of spare cash. After all, one can purchase any fabulous offering and then return the next day or week for a full refund. A common practice is to buy some blouses for example and then return to get instead a more expensive dress where the "difference" is not very signicant. So these "shoppers" feel that they have been very smart and even spending wisely.

As women shop, so they accumulate kudos from their friend of that day, with whom they compare their "winnings" over lunch at the department store restaurant. This is equivalent to a man taking off a we essay afternoon with a colleague for a round of golf and 2 tequila lunch at the club restaurant.

That is an enlightening description of the activity, but I am not so sure it applies to that exhibition. When Lauren Greenfield filled up a shopping cart at Target, she was alone and did not plan to return any of the items, I think. The pictures do not appear to be about shopping, but about outrageous stuff that people bough and did not return. Lauren can only photography what people have, not what they sent back. So I think the exhibition is about something different: it is about people who define their position up the social ladder by their possessions. The more you have and the more outlandish it is, the higher your status. Brands are also essential in that game.

Possibly this behaviour and the one you describe are two facets of the same story.

Whereas golf for men brings no shame, with women's shopping, however, this is often a secretive activity. In some families, the purchases are hidden from the husband as the woman feels vulnerable to criticism and ridicule for gathering "stuff" they really don't need.

Possibly, that shame is part of the explanation why the behaviour as experienced by Lauren Greenfield and the one you describe are different. If person A has friends who will mock him/her for buying useless stuff and person B has friends who will not but, on the opposite, display admiration or envy to what he or she bought, you may get one or the other result.

Besides, up to a point we are all guilty of buying stuff we don't need, men and women. Since this place is a photography forum, I can point out that people, predominantly male, buy cameras they do not need. They get the same stigma as women when they shop: on photography forums I used I saw men posting that:
-they need to convince their wife when buying new equipment and
-answers that basically mock them for buying that equipment.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
If one goes to Hermes on Rodeo Drive, and gets upstairs to see the collection of their exclusive leather handbags, one can put one's name down and for $6,000 one could get the purse in months.........and have bragging rights, or not!

Asher
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Interestingly, The Wall Street Journal has noted that even the wealthy are now starting to change their buying habits. Designer handbags, shoes and purses which could demand prices from over $2,000 to $10,000 are down in sales and the same goods can be found online for less. So the dynamics of the "shopping" as a woman's sport is changing. Younger women are not so taken with grossly over priced non-essential luxury items and resist being drawn into this treadmill of accumulating goods. Instead an experience or vacation might be chosen.

So a new move has been made to seduce the young potentially high wage earners by allowing them to rent the unnecessary luxury designer goods they cannot possibly afford right now!", move akin to giving away samples of illegal drugs through the school fence to the kids in the schoolyard!

Enjoy the Wall Street Journal video, here
 

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
Luxury goods worldwide market study fall-winter 2016

An excerpt:

The market for personal luxury goods—the “core of the core” and the focus of this analysis—was essentially flat, at €249 billion. That represents a 1% contraction at current exchange rates and no change in market size from €251 billion in 2015 (at constant exchange rates). This is the third consecutive year of modest growth at constant exchange rates, and it represents a new normal in which luxury companies no longer benefit from a favorable market and free-spending consumers. Brexit, the US presidential election and terrorism have all led to significant uncertainty and lower consumer confidence, hindering sales of personal luxury goods. In this environment, companies no longer grow and generate profits merely by riding favorable economic tailwinds.
 
Top