Photography collection reveals the empty spending habits of the world’s super rich
Lauren Greenfield’s “Generation Wealth” shows what happens when money is divorced from class expectations
By Kheiro Magazine
LOS ANGELES — A Russian shipping magnate’s lithe, blond trophy wife walks with her young daughter through their sparse, cavernous mansion. A Chinese executive tees up a golf ball in her ode-to-Versace apartment. A grand staircase is assembled in a Florida billionaire’s recreation of the Palace of Versailles.
These are some of the images of “Generation Wealth,” a retrospective collection of the three decades photographer Lauren Greenfield spent documenting wealth, its pursuit and its consequences. Her body of work represents a longitudinal and comparative study of the questions: What are the values of people whose wealth is not encumbered by class expectations? How and why do they express their wealth, and how does society in turn respond?
“The thing about this project is: It’s not about the rich, it’s really about our aspiration to wealth and our needing to show it off whether we have it or not,” Greenfield told NPR when the exhibit first opened in May at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles.
It recently finished its run there and will re-open Sept. 20 at the International Center for Photography in New York City. A staggering 504-page volume, complete with an intentionally ironic gold cover, accompanies the exhibit.
The collection’s scope spans continents as well as decades, with scenes ranging from plastic surgery patients in Los Angeles to the foreclosure crisis in Ireland to the nouveau riche in China and Russia.
The images are accompanied by a 25-minute documentary in which Greenfield describes how she grew up in L.A. in proximity to wealth but not a direct recipient of it. She began photographing kids in Beverly Hills and South L.A. in the early 1990s.
These early images offer striking examples of “rich kids who wanted to look like poor kids,” adopting their colorful, baggy clothing because they thought it made them look more edgy and authentic. Meanwhile the poor kids saved for months to afford prom limos and luxury brands, emulating the rich kids to exude status and importance.
And long before the words “cultural appropriation” had entered the mainstream, the South L.A. kids were pointing out to Greenfield how ironic it was that their loud style of clothing made them “hood” even as it was embraced by the wealthy kids closer to the coast.
Greenfield was drawn to Los Angeles because of its extremes; the things that are happening in L.A. are happening everywhere, but here they are so exaggerated that they are impossible to ignore, she explains in the documentary short.
Economic striving, sex for sale, a war against age and nature, unbridled materialism, that feedback loop between rich and poor. It was all there in the pop cultural interactions between residents of the same city who never have and never will meet face to face.
Documenting hyped youth and consumer cultures naturally led Greenfield to a broader look at female sexuality, celebrity culture and aging. She found herself in Real Housewives territory — surrounded by people for whom money was no longer a means to an end, but the end in and of itself.
Greenfield’s style is observational and non-judgmental, but the images and accompanying interviews provoke a strong response.
One of the most striking things about the exhibit is how empty it all feels. So much of the subject matter is performative or fake: the fake White House built by Chinese billionaire Huang Qiaoling, fake body parts being inserted into or sculpted onto patients, and even subjects who project fake happiness.
The shipping magnate’s wife, Ilona, describes her isolation and loneliness in that big, sparsely decorated house. Florian Homm, a financier charged with investment fraud who spent six years in hiding from federal U.S. authorities, poses in a brothel he once owned and explains how he was never satisfied even at the height of his wealth.
Many of Greenfield’s subjects inadvertently reveal an utter inability to spend their money in meaningful ways. Their wealth drives no new ideas, no innovation, no cultural advancement — they have so many resources at their disposal and yet nothing new is actually built. No legacy is secured beyond a legacy of self-involvement.
In short, the exhibit offers the ultimate, albeit perhaps unintentional, debunking of trickle-down economics. It also begs the question: Why do the poor and middle classes obsess over and emulate these spending habits instead of resenting the wealthy for their shallow excesses?
The exhibit offers one possible explanation: they have bought into the elite’s carefully crafted survival myth that you too can have all of this if you play your cards right.
The truth, of course, is that you can’t, as evidenced by shots of empty homes and neighborhoods that Greenfield took in Iceland and Ireland following the 2008 financial crisis.
These images show the impact of the crisis on people outside the oligarch class who bought the lie — via high-risk mortgages and other ill-advised financial decisions — that they too could join the global elite. But for those lacking inherited wealth to fall back on, the consequences of this type of social striving can be disastrous.
These lessons don’t seem to have stuck, though, as evidenced by the political rise of the petulant boy king now occupying the White House. The U.S. president promises to deregulate the county’s financial and housing markets back to their pre-2008 levels, and to widen income inequality even further by defunding health care for the poor and middle classes in order to pay for tax cuts for the rich.
The proposed policies would send the U.S. economy back into a tailspin — likely dragging the world economy back down with it — and yet the market has never been stronger and consumer spending has never been higher.
“I think the backdrop of these 25 years is that we’ve never had more inequality and we’ve never had less social mobility,” Greenfield told NPR in May. “In a way, fictitious social mobility — bling and presentation — has replaced real social mobility … because it’s all you can get.”
The exhibit “Generation Wealth” opens Sept. 20 at the International Center for Photography in New York City. The accompanying book (Phaidron, 2017) is available here.
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