wealth Archives - Mental Wealth

In Generation Wealth, Lauren Greenfield’s latest, the documentarian and photographer behind 2012’s award-winning Queen of Versailles lets her ambition run wild.

In many ways, Wealth is a natural extension of Versailles, a cautionary tale about one family’s efforts to build the largest home in America. This newest documentary widens the scope, taking on a world made sick with overconsumption—but that’s an oversimplification given how much Greenfield takes on in this 106-minute manifesto and career retrospective. The film is, at once, a look back on 25 years’ worth of Greenfield’s work, a deep dive into the lives of her subjects, captured over decades, and a meditation on consumerism, Kardashian culture, and the rise and fall of the American empire.

American Wealth Gone Wild: A Blistering Takedown of Greedy Kardashian Culture

The binding of Lauren Greenfield’s new book of photography, “Generation Wealth,” has the color and sheen of a bar of yellow gold. The book has the heft of bullion, too: at seven pounds, it is too heavy to hold in a single hand, and too weighty to read unless rested on a lap or table. The size is demanded by the scope of the work. It consists of five hundred glossy pages of Greenfield’s photographs from the last quarter century, along with accompanying text. The images range from portraits of high-school students and gangbangers in Los Angeles, in the early nineteen-nineties, to photos of plastic-surgery aficionados undergoing their painful rites in the mid-two-thousands to pictures of high rollers at Las Vegas casinos “making it rain,” tossing stacks of dollar bills like confetti to the glee of those around them. But the book’s design also seems intended to be ironic commentary on the culture, or subcultures, it seeks to portray: materialistic, vulgar, excessive, and wasteful. The book would fit perfectly into the pseudo-rococo decorating scheme of the penthouse apartment at Trump Tower.

What Rampant Materialism Looks Like, and What It Costs | The New Yorker