Mammon’s little darlings

In the early Nineties, I used to hang around the parking lot of my old school in Santa Monica, California, trying to photograph “growing up in Los Angeles”. One day, three boys asked what I was doing. When I told them, they said, in that case, I had to “show money. That’s what it’s all about.”

They pulled bills out of their pockets, and I shot the boys holding them up. It wasn’t until I developed the film and looked at the images with a loupe that I saw that these 13-year-olds were waving $100 bills. Another 13-year-old, named Adam, confided in me that “money ruins kids. Money has ruined me.”

In today’s world, where the Kardashian offspring are household names and where Uber lets teens have their own “limo” at the touch of a smartphone, it is hard to remember why readers were shocked by my picture of two girls eating pizza in the back of a limousine on the way to a rock concert when it was first published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine in 1992.

Since that time, many of the phenomena that kids such as Adam helped me to understand in LA have exploded across the globe. Not only can everyone be famous today – via social media – but celebrities have become more and more a part of our everyday lives. The novelist Bret Easton Ellis observes that “LA kids were the first to have this intimate access to the movie business – how it works, who its stars were… That narcissism that is so full-blown in the culture now was just beginning to rear its head in that moment in LA… before it spread out everywhere.”

I remember saying on the radio in the late Nineties that – despite the dramatic divisions in LA revealed by riots that I had covered in 1992 – rich kids and poor kids had found common ground that their parents had not, and it was a shared love for Versace. A decade on, when I documented uncannily similar imagery and phenomena during the global financial crisis of 2008 across the US and around the world, from California to Florida, and in Dubai, Ireland, and Iceland, I realised that many of the stories I had photographed since the early Nineties were part of a larger narrative. A diet of mass media had brought about an unexpected homogenisation, especially of youth culture. What people across the world had in common was now more powerful than their differences.

For the past eight years, I have been compiling Generation Wealth, a book and companion film, from work made over the past three decades, such as my 2012 documentary The Queen of Versailles, about the timeshare king David Siegel and his wife Jackie; Thin, my 2006 film about women with eating disorders; and my books Girl Culture (2002) and Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood (1997). I have conducted more than 500 interviews, edited more than half a million photographs and taken more than 50,000 new shots.

The title of Generation Wealth and many of the pictures could mislead the reader into thinking

Photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield traces our obsession with bling and celebrity back to the ‘rich kid’ culture she exposed in Nineties Los Angeles