News Investigation

On Girlhood: Lauren Greenfield & Eimear Lynch in Conversation

Dec 2024 🇬🇧 AnOther Magazine

Published by AnOther Magazine in December 2024, this conversation pairs Lauren Greenfield with Irish photographer Eimear Lynch on how the media environment around girlhood has shifted across their careers. Greenfield traces her arc from documenting 1990s teenagers shaped by television, film, and music in Fast Forward and Girl Culture to her 2024 series Social Studies, which examines how social media intensifies many of the same body-image and peer-pressure dynamics for today's teenagers. Lynch, whose own book documents Irish teenagers on nights out, observes that underlying social pressures on girls have changed less than the technology surrounding them, since most subjects now carry phones and film themselves throughout the same rituals. Both discuss whether awareness of these pressures protects young people from experiencing them. TechKids Foundation cites this exchange as Greenfield's own account of how screen-based media has intensified, rather than created, long-documented pressures on girls.

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CITATION

Havlin, Laura. "On Girlhood: Lauren Greenfield & Eimear Lynch in Conversation." AnOther Magazine, December 9, 2024.

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