Lauren Greenfield's exhibition THIN at Fahey Klein is a disturbing, schizophrenic experience where one suddenly feels something like Faye Dunaway in Chinatown yelling "My daughter, my sister. My daughter, my sister," until someone slaps you out of it.

Photography is inherently glamorous, especially fine art photography at a major Los Angeles gallery. Therefore, a photo exhibition featuring young women struggling with eating disorders and life-threatening low self-image is not just a little bit challenging. It's seriously confrontational.

Here, Greenfield's work beautifully documents an ugly truth using one of the same mediums that is in part responsible for creating the illnesses in the first place. And we, as consumers and critics of art, find ourselves alternating between feeling sympathy, sadness, and guilt for the subjects to actively objectifying the "models" as perfect tools for creating remarkable, memorable, emotionally evocative, and timeless works of art. The feeling is not unlike what happens when facing Diane Arbus' images from the mental asylum just before her death. Gorgeous, horrible, gorgeous, horrible.



Greenfield, however, is an expert, not only as an empathic anthropologist documenting "Girl Culture, " which she has been doing for more than a decade, but as an artist as well who can turn the most unsettling image into a stand-alone masterpiece. This latter point is perhaps the biggest hurdle with THIN. Greenfield's portraits are indeed magic. They have that inexplicable something that makes photos magnetic but which cannot be grasped by common language or taught to other artists. It's that final element after an artist has harnessed a vision and mastered a craft that breaths the final life into a work of art. It is nothing less than the artist herself.


Pushing past any hesitation toward the subject matter, this show is definitely worth seeing. The accompanying book helps frame the experience more compassionately than I would and apparently, the film by the same title is being celebrated worldwide.

-bryson strauss

Check it out at:

Fahey/Klien Gallery
148 North La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90036
(323) 934-2250
http://www.faheykleingallery.com/