There are toddlers vamping à la Britney Spears. A beanpole of a teen, clad in pearls and a little black dress, weighs herself on a bathroom scale. An overweight girl, marooned on her bed, sits surrounded by posters of the teen-crush pop group Hanson. On a beach, a topless college girl runs a gauntlet of drunken guys on spring break. The photographs are seductive on the surface, but they leave an aftertaste of anxiety. Which is why it is something of a surprise to encounter an upbeat, cherubically pretty Greenfield—think Molly Ringwald, all grown up—one morning at her airy home in Venice, Calif. “I’m trying to lose the baby weight,” says the pleasantly plump mother of five-month-old Gabriel and six-year-old Noah. “But I’m not obsessed with it.”

In beige silk cargo pants and a loose, bright print top, Greenfield bears no resemblance to the fraught young exhibitionists and fashion victims she shoots. But it is, in fact, her closeness to her subjects that makes her an astute chronicler. She came of age in early-1980s Los Angeles, the daughter of Harvard-educated academics in a town not inclined to elevate intellectuals. A standout student whose mother tried to be a countercultural influence, Greenfield still found herself “concerned with weight and fashion and fitting in.” She says now, reflecting, “I realized if I was thinking about these things—what kinds of jeans I’m buying—then there must be something in this.”

That connection to her subjects lends Greenfield’s work its immediacy, says Trudy Wilner Stack, the co-curator of the traveling museum exhibit tied to Greenfield’s 2002 book, Girl Culture. “The tradition of photojournalism is often of looking at the other—coming in as a photographer and making sense of something that’s outside your experience,” she says. “I think oneof the keys to Lauren’s work has been her willingness to implicate herself and to not hide.” And that’s what makes Thin, her upcoming film about girls in a treatment center for eating disorders, shockingly, eerily intimate.

Greenfield broke onto the scene with her first book, Fast Forward, in 1997. A portrait of a generation growing up in the shadows of Los Angeles, the photographs run the gamut from MTV-worthy prep-school proms to pimped-out loiterers in South Central. Lush but subversive, they depict a world where money seems to be out of control and sex is sold to kids as though it were soda. With its complex interplay between the candy-colored drama of the photos and the surreal self-absorption of the interviews that accompany them, the work won her the prestigious International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for Young Photographer in 1997. It also introduced Greenfield—who spent three years researching and shooting the book—as a journalist.

Her next book, Girl Culture, took the themes of Fast Forward a step further. For inspiration, she turned to Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, which explores the contemporary emphasis of appearance over personal values. “What I was trying to talk about was the way the body has become the primary expression of identity for girls and women,” Greenfield says.

Now, four years later, Greenfield has directed Thin, a documentary airing on HBO in November that takes viewers inside Renfrew, a Florida residential treatment center for eating disorders. “It is her warmest work, in a way, her most richly human work,” says R.J. Cutler, her co-producer.

The narrative follows four young women, each intimately and affectionately portrayed. Polly is the talkative ringleader, the type who initiates illicit smoking under the vents in the ladies’ room; Brittany, the youngest at 15, seems to use her Goth eyeliner to distract from her cry-at-the-drop-of-a-hat vulnerability; Shelly, even more physically fragile than the rest, is a budding intellectual and caretaker; and Alisa is the smiling, athletic-looking mother of two who seems so strong that it makes her weakness, when it comes to her disease, all the more shocking. “Her photography is not only extremely revealing and extremely beautiful, but her process is really to get under their skin,” Cutler says of Greenfield.

At points, the film is uncomfortably personal, showing tearful group therapy sessions and Alisa purging. “Sometimes I would feel like we were such an intrusion, and I would expect everyone to go nuts about the film,” says Greenfield, who has never suffered from an eating disorder. “But the idea that we were the biggest thing going on in their lives was just not so at all. Because first of all, they were very sick, and second of all, it’s a really narcissistic disease.”

That doesn’t mean they weren’t concerned with how they would appear. To get unguarded access, Greenfield assured her subjects that Amanda Micheli, her cinematographer, would turn the camera off at any time; in the end, Greenfield estimates, she spent half of her time negotiating with her subjects about what she could film.

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