“Growing up, I never thought I was going to be an artist,” Greenfield says. It was during college, when she spent her junior year abroad, that “I kind of felt like I had found my calling—looking at culture.” Among her influences was the work of Barbara P. Norfleet, whose book All the Right People chronicled Boston’s upper crust in images and interviews, along with that of Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Robert Frank.

But on an early assignment in Chiapas, Mexico, for National Geographic, Greenfield’s struggle to gain access to subjects got her thinking about her own backyard. In Chiapas, language was only the first barrier. Shooting at all was difficult: Locals believe being photographed steals one’s soul. “I felt like I spent months trying to get in, and once I got in I could make a picture that was just describing the surface,” she says. While there, Greenfield came upon a dog-eared copy of the Bret Easton Ellis novel Less Than Zero and reread it. “I started thinking, this is the culture that I grew up in,” she recalls. She began to think that the look-at-me inhabitants of her hometown might be a good creative bet. It made sense, she realized, “to gravitate toward people who want to talk to me and are interested in being photographed.” She spent the next three years creating Fast Forward. Thirty-one rejection slips later, she signed with Knopf, and, as her husband and business partner Frank Evers says, “We kicked into gear.”

Greenfield is aware that some of the enthusiasm her work generates is a result of the sexiness of her subjects. But she hopes Thin will deglamorize a disease that obsessive coverage of celebrities like Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan effectively celebrates. So she was excited when the entertainment program Extra ran a segment on Thin when the documentary screened at Sundance earlier this year. “I feel like it’s going to give this problem a lot of exposure,” she says.

Greenfield’s inner compass clearly demands that she use her power cannily, a sort of jujitsu to challenge the culture that is the source of the problems she elucidates. That can be especially tricky in advertising and fashion work. Although Greenfield makes a point of not shooting ads that she feels feed into women’s neuroses (she recently turned down a freelance job with Slim-Fast), her fashion work was initially a conundrum.

“At first I was like, how can I do fashion? My work has all been about how fashion affects girls in a really negative way.” But when Elle’s creative director, Gilles Bensimon, recruited her, he told her to “do your thing.” Still unsure, Greenfield considered what one of the magazine’s editors said was going on in sartorial circles that season. Boxy skirts did nothing for her, but the next trend—lingerie as outerwear—did. “I thought, that’s perfect for me because Girl Culture had really been about exhibitionism.” She shot the models in a retirement home, playing with the idea of how inappropriate skimpy outfits can be in daily life. “We get there and a stretcher comes out—somebody had had a heart attack,” she recalls. “The French stylist from Elle was like, what are we doing?”

Greenfield has occasionally been able to land a one-two punch with a single photograph. A portrait of the actress Azura Skye commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar later became a page in Girl Culture. “She looked so thin that I thought the magazine wouldn’t run any of the pictures. But they ran a double spread,” she says. In Girl Culture, she was able to juxtapose that photo with an image of a patient being blind-weighed at an eating-disorder clinic. “At the end of the day,” Greenfield says, “it’s all part of a bigger project for me.”

Greenfield is hoping to bring even more people into the project this fall during what Evers calls “the period of Thin.” In addition to the HBO documentary and its accompanying book, there’s an October exhibit at Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles; a separate traveling show, co-curated by Wilner Stack (who worked with Greenfield on the Girl Culture exhibit), that opens at the Women’s Museum in Dallas in February; and the launch of a website that will serve as a forum for discussion about eating disorders and body image.

One thing Greenfield has been faulted for is focusing fairly relentlessly on the downside of girl culture—ignoring, say, the Riot Grrl movement of the ’90s and failing to showcase positive relationships that girls have in their adolescent years. To counter that, some school classes that have seen the traveling exhibit have taken it upon themselves to mount parallel exhibits showing their own vision of their culture. Which Greenfield applauds. “I was just isolating one part of girl culture,” she says. “It wasn’t really fair that I called it that, when there are a million other books that could be done. But part of the reason I use the broad titles is the same reason I use the bright colors and glossy images. You bring people in, and then they find out something else.”

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Strawberry Saroyan is the author of Girl Walks into a Bar: A Memoir published by Random House. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine.

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