Lauren Greenfield - Social Studies

Making TikToks, Holly and Bella, both 17, Pacific Palisades, 2021 © Lauren Greenfield, Fahey Klein Gallery "Social media is our lifeline but it's also a loaded gun." – Jonathan, 18 "There are so many old men on Twitter looking for feet pics." – Ivy, 17 "Because I'm brown and I'm a bigger person, you could call me a cyberbully's field day." – Dominic, 17 These aren't just quotes. They're lived experiences of three of the thirty teenagers in Los Angeles who shared their phones with Lauren Greenfield as part of a radical experiment documenting the impact of social media on their lives. Over 150 days of filming and more than 2,000 hours of screen recordings; they gave her access to their real and digital lives: their feeds, their texts, their posts, the images and messages they had never shown their parents. The result is Social Studies. The new exhibition opens at Fotografiska Berlin on 25 September 2026. Social Studies is Greenfield's latest and deepest investigation into how the media and popular culture transforms coming of age and the first written from inside the phone. "Social media amplifies exponentially many of the trends I have previously examined in my three-decade documentation of American adolescence." – Lauren Greenfield Her earlier works Fast Forward (1997), Girl Culture (2002), and THIN (2006) predate the smartphone, diagnosing a generation shaped by cameras, comparison, and consumer culture long before Instagram existed. The exhibition arrives in Berlin as Europe intensifies its debate over social media restrictions for minors, with France already enforcing age limits and several other countries like Germany considering similar measures. It is not a policy argument. It is a portrait – raw, unfiltered, and rendered in the vocabulary of the generation it documents. First released globally as a five-part documentary series on FX and Disney+, Social Studies now becomes an exhibition you walk through. Across 5,000 square feet, Greenfield explores what usually lives inside a six-inch screen, slowing the endless scroll until it becomes visible – and legible – as a shared experience of adolescence. Through photographs, installations, and immersive environments, the exhibition traces how social media reshapes identity. Giant photo grids turn private posts into public conversation: hundreds of snapshots, viral beauty trends, and emotional selfies exploring bullying, beauty standards, comparison, race, sexuality, and the life-altering decisions of teenage life. A dedicated screening room presents all five episodes of the Social Studies documentary series, inviting visitors to spend extended time with the voices at the heart of the exhibition.