The Girl in the Mirror

Noted photographer Lauren Greenfield remembers standing as a preteen in front of her closet on Saturdays, paralyzed by having to decide what to wear to Hebrew school. Knowing that one of her classmates owned 17 pairs of Chemin de Fers, the most sought-after designer jeans of the time, didn't make her task any easier. Though concern about how she looked ran through her adolescence, it was relatively benign by today's standards, as Greenfield learned in the 1990s when she began to shoot the images that became Girl Culture. The photographic exhibit is on view until January 4, 2004, at the Skirball Museum and Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Her book of the same name, with an introduction by Joan Jacobs Brumberg, the foremost historian of American girlhood, was released in September 2002.

The exhibit's 40 photographs—and accompanying interviews in the subjects' own voices—offer an intimate glimpse into the social and emotional lives of girls and young women, engaged in grooming, makeup, fashion, plastic surgery and dieting. The most poignant images capture them at the extremes of the weight-loss spectrum—anorexics at an eating disorders clinic and sad-faced, overweight youngsters attending weight-loss camp.

This is an important exhibit, not only for girls and their parents but for those brave enough to examine their own and society's tendency to measure a girl's—or a woman's—worth by the shape of her body. For further information, go to www.skirball.org or call 310-440-4500.