Fast forward

About this book

From the affluent children of the Westside to the graffiti gangs and party crews of East L.A., the Los Angeles young are obsessed by the seductive lifestyle of the entertainment industry, with its emphasis on celebrity, looks, money, and things. Greenfield's pictures and text chronicle vastly disparate yet eerily similar child societies: an eight-year-old recording his own rap music in his father's home recording studio, a gay teenager experimenting with drag at the Hollywood High School for the Performing Arts, a Latino tagger seeking recognition and respect by spray-painting the name of his crew on the city's walls and buses. L.A.'s children are indoctrinated early into the cult of image: Greenfield documents a competition for aspiring models, a teen recovering from a nose job, and a thirteen-year-old working out with her personal trainer. Copying their inner-city peers, rich Beverly Hills kids hang in crews and talk like gangsters; the poor and the affluent sport pagers and hip-hop fashion, step out at lavish proms, cruise in stoked-up cars. Through Greenfield's compassionate and incisive lens, we become witness to an arresting vision of our children and our society.