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press release
Lauren Greenfield
Generation Wealth
22 August 2019 – 26 January 2020
The Louisiana has a long-standing tradition of looking at the world through the documentary genre. In Generation Wealth the American photographer Lauren Greenfield takes an eye-opening, retrospective look at 25 years of consumer culture which in her view has changed the world, bringing it a raw materialism, a cult of celebrity culture and undisguised narcissism.
Generation Wealth is an incomparable documentation of decades of consumer culture gone wild and takes us along as witnesses to the rampages of financial movements all over the world: Iceland, Dubai, Ireland, Russia and of course God’s own country, the USA. The more than 200 pictures, films and interviews in the exhibition are moving, harrowing and fascinating experiences.
With the tools of the documentarist – images and interviews – Lauren Greenfield (b. 1966) presents us with the visual culture of a period of unprecedented consumerism. At an early stage Greenfield was interested in the commercial mechanisms in play around teenagers just at the time when they make their debut as consumers: how the cult of the body, youth, sexuality and looking wealthy became the true currency of society. This is not new knowledge for either sociologists or economists, but in the hands of Greenfield these patterns become visible to all of us, and the result is nothing less than visual shell-shock.
“I buy, therefore I am,” could very well be singled out as the logic and identity definition that the consumer culture coerces people into all over the globe, creating a dependence that quite literally harms the human body and soul. Greenfield not only depicts the winners. In a new Louisiana Channel production Lauren Greenfield talks about the background of the exhibition and the documentary film Generation Wealth. Now, a few years after the completion of the project in 2017, Greenfield says: “I think what is in my pictures is not something that can be marginalized, especially in the time of Trump. As much as we want to say ‘this is not us’, this is holding a mirror.”