Lauren Greenfield
Every girl is affected by the desire to be thin. In the United States, we grow up feeling like our bodies are an expression of our inner selves. To be thin is to be beautiful, disciplined, and even moral. Fat is equated with laziness, slovenliness, a lack of regard for oneself, and a deficiency of self-control.
Perhaps it is due to the power of these ideas in our culture that the pathology of eating disorders has become so common and severe. Eating disorders now affect one in seven American women and have become a mental health epidemic. Though often glamorized or trivialized in popular culture, they are actually the deadliest of all psychiatric disorders.
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The making of Thin was a continuation of my decade-long exploration of body image and the way the female body has become a primary expression of identity for girls and women. I spent five years photographing and interviewing girls and women around the country for a book and exhibition called Girl Culture. In that work, I explored the way the body is a medium for girls to express their identities, ambitions, insecurities, and struggles. I was interested in the fact that girls learn from an early age that a woman's power comes from her body and its display. The way girls present, decorate, reveal, and manipulate their bodies is a reflection of society's conflicting messages and expectations of women. The female body has become a tabula rasa on which one can view the interplay between society's imprint and the individual's voice and psychology.
In this context, the pathology of eating disorders is compelling, symbolic, and important to understand. It is extreme and atypical, but unlike most other mental illness, it has a visible relationship to the values of mainstream culture. Yet while the symptoms look strangely familiar, it is unfathomable to most of us how or why the common dieter crosses the abyss into irrational, self-destructive, and even suicidal behavior.
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We live in a culture that supports obsessions with the body, food, self-improvement, and personal transformation of a physical nature. Perhaps this is why we are fascinated with eating disorders and why they have been glamorized by a media that highlights the rich and famous celebrities who have fallen in its wake. In the mainstream, we love to eat and focus on food, and yet we also condemn ourselves for engaging in this very act required for our survival. Any girl who has lost or gained weight can provide evidence that people respond more positively to thin people than to fat (more friends, more boyfriends, the kindness of strangers, etc.). The “before” and “after” pictures used to sell diet products and plans, weight-loss camp, plastic surgery, and reality TV shows such as The Swan and Extreme Makeover rely on the shared assumption that our bodies are an extension of the “American Dream”-blank canvases of a meritocracy where we can paint our own dreams and achieve our goals if we devote enough hard work, money, and time to get the job done-the Puritan ethic interpreted within the culture of narcissism.
I began Thin with an interest in the most pathological and exaggerated manifestation of the “body project” that engages most of us to some lesser degree. Eating disorders seemed a cautionary tale about society's unhealthy emphasis on our physiques and the implied relationships between our inner and outer attributes. I have been a chronic dieter myself, especially during my teenage years, and can relate to obsession over calories and nutritional content. I can identify with Alisa, one of the women featured in the film and book, when she changes her clothes 10 times before going out the door and explains that her wardrobe choices are based on what is slenderizing rather than color or season. This is the kind of “insanity,” “obsession,” and “compulsion” that otherwise rational women experience every day. I have strictly dieted, religiously exercised, emotionally overeaten, and even tried purging a couple times with little success (the work of an amateur, as my Renfrew subjects would call it). And yet, even with that background, I was ignorant of the true nature of eating disorders and how difficult they are to overcome.
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While the Girl Culture journey was very personal for me, inspired by my own body-image issues and memories from childhood, Thin was a crossing into the unknown. Though it began with a familiar departure point of the body project, it descended quickly into the heart of darkness of mental illness. The women in the film and book helped me navigate the deep, difficult places that I have never known firsthand. They allowed me to bear witness to their struggle and document the disease and its damage. I came to understand that the mental disorder is far removed from the world of popular culture, vanity, materialism, and self-esteem issues that have been the thematic preoccupations of my prior work. If anything, the superficial similarities that eating disorders have to mainstream dieting has led to a misunderstanding of the sufferers by their peers, families, the media, and insurance companies.
Although the reasons people develop eating disorders are complex and individual, it is clear that they function as a coping mechanism, like drugs, alcohol, or cutting-used to numb out intolerable emotional pain and experience a sense of control. The fact that this particular coping strategy is so prevalent in our time is a logical consequence of a society obsessed with the concept of an ideal body. Perhaps the primacy of self-expression through one's body explains why there is an overlap between people who self-harm by cutting and those who engage in the slow suicide of an eating disorder.
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This cultural focus on the female body that was the subject of my earlier work, Girl Culture, might well explain why that series of photographs hit a nerve that allowed them to travel and reverberate in ways I could never have imagined. The accompanying educational curriculum was used by young people and educators around the country, and the museums that showed the exhibition created a broad range of outreach and community programs around it. From the e-mails I received, the art that people sent me, and the personal nature of the comments written in museum guest books, I understood that girls and women had made it their own. The grassroots response made me want to go deeper into the subject by harnessing the narrative potential of film. I brought the idea of a series of documentary films based on Girl Culture to producer R. J. Cutler, and to Sheila Nevins and Lisa Heller at HBO, and we decided that I would direct my first film on the subject of eating disorders.
I first visited the Renfrew Center in South Florida, one of the best-known residential facilities for the treatment of eating disorders, in 1997, as a photojournalist on assignment for Time. I returned there again to photograph for Girl Culture. As a photographer, I found it a challenging yet compelling place to work. The stories of the women were incredible and the atmosphere raw and honest. There was natural drama and tension that was emotional, narrative, and cinematic. Actually, the very things that stymied me as a still photographer-the repetition of the daily rituals; the claustrophobic nature of institutional life; the monochromatic fluorescent color palette - were rich and communicative elements in the storytelling process of filmmaking.
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Having made multiple trips to the facility, I was drawn to the familiarity of the place, but also to its structure. The fact that it was an all-female residential facility with 40 beds gave it the atmosphere of a college dorm. There was inherent “girl culture”-female bonding, competition, gossip, cliques, and the complex social dynamics between girls-that was both familiar and turbo-charged in comparison to the communities of girls I had photographed before.
The only remaining question was one of access. Would a treatment facility give me the access that I needed to tell this story, and would I be able to gain the trust and candor of a population that has deep-seated trust issues, a debilitating body image (which could be further activated by the presence of a camera), and whose modus operandi (as part of their illness) is trafficking in secrets, lies, and manipulation?
The Renfrew Center never wavered in their cooperation or enthusiasm for the project. They understood my need for journalistic independence free from editorial influence or conditions. The staff taught me about the illness and daily life within the institution and guided me in gaining the trust of the residents, each of whom could choose whether or not to participate. The residents came on board gradually and unpredictably-sometimes with enthusiasm, at other times with hesitation or apprehension, and at the best of times, unexpected openness and partnership. My work with them was an intense but fluid dance. For reasons practical and ethical, the subjects were my collaborators, and when we had obstacles, roadblocks, questions, concerns, we had to work them out together to move forward. A challenging situation for a documentarian, this dynamic required me to remain open and vulnerable to the residents' moods, issues, and changes of heart and mind toward the filming. I also continuously laid my own goals, process, and needs on the table with patients and staff in private meetings and community group-therapy sessions.
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Once on board, the women were incredibly generous and honest with their stories and their lives. Their body-image struggles were so profound and their illness so all-encompassing that the image issues people often have in relation to cameras were comparatively insignificant. The women understood the importance of being documented in their highs and their lows to show the reality and the devastation of the disease. We worked through these ups and downs in a protracted, intimate way such that they related to me and my (all-female) crew as people rather than as cameras, or the “media.”
The resulting film is a cinema-verité exploration that follows four women-Shelly, Polly, Brittany, and Alisa-in their daily lives at the Renfrew Center. While following their individual stories, the documentary investigates the process of treatment, the culture of rehab, the cycle of addiction, and the unique relationships, rules, and rituals that define everyday life within the institution that is their temporary home. What emerges is a portrait of an illness that is frustrating in its complexity and tenacity, and shattering in the pain it inflicts on its sufferers and their loved ones.
I decided to make this companion book because of the stories and information that could not be communicated in the film, and because photography with words is my first and most natural voice. I also wanted to tell a broader story about the diversity of the population affected-older women, women of color, adolescents, and obese women (“emotional eaters”)-which I could do more effectively in photography. I wanted the film to be purely experiential so the viewer could understand the emotional reality of living with this illness. To that end, we deliberately stayed away from a didactic approach of lengthy interviews and “talking head” experts. For the book, however, there was an opportunity for me to conduct first-person interviews to flesh out the backstories that help to understand the origins of each woman's illness. There was also the possibility of a more longitudinal view of the central women from the film-seeing their transformations from early childhood pictures through the process of treatment at Renfrew to post-treatment interviews chronicling both recovery and relapse. After the film was complete, Shelly, Polly, Brittany, and Alisa entrusted me with their private diaries to first read and then include in this book. The journals give expression to the powerful internal voices of an eating disorder and the fierce struggle between that voice and the one of recovery. All of the handwritten passages that appear in the book are excerpts from their diaries and art.
The women in these photographs are incredibly brave to share their stories and the intimate details of their private struggles with a tragic illness. Eating disorders are fueled by secrets and lies. These women decided that by being honest with the camera and with me, they could possibly make a difference for themselves and for others. I am honored by their courage, trust, and collaboration, and I dedicate this book to them.
http://www.laurengreenfield.com/
