"It's all I want, to be thin. And if dying is what it takes to get there....so be it" Alisa (patient at Renfrew treatment centre)

Lauren Greenfield is one of my favorite documentary photographers because of her ability to get under the skin of her subjects. Her book Girl Culture is full of photos showing what it's like to be a pre-teen/teenage girl growing up in Western Culture, the battles both physically and mentally that you go through to try and find acceptance for your body and who you are, not only from others but from yourself. Her photos show how media overload and our over saturated culture has affected girls growing up and distorted their vision of what it is to be "a woman". 

A series of Greenfield's that I find particularly moving is "Thin",  a collection of photographs and a documentary film that she made when she spent six months staying in a treatment centre in Florida for people with eating disorders. During her time there she got unrestricted access to therapy sessions, weigh ins, mealtimes, everything. The images are very intimate and examine the relationships that the patients build with each other, with the staff and with themselves, you can really see the pain and desperation in their faces. By being there for six months Greenfield would have gained the trust of everybody in the community and they may have even accepted her as part of the furniture, forgetting that she was there, allowing her to have more access to the true goings on, as opposed to what people put on as a front when they are very aware that a camera is watching. Greenfield has said that she made the series to show "what it's like to have an eating disorder." I think this is impossible to do due to the complexities of an illness such as anorexia, without being in that state for mind I think it would be very difficult to imagine how the patients are feeling. However I think Greenfield's work gets the viewer as close as possible to understanding them and what they're going through, it's very moving and you feel a real empathy for the people in it. The fact that one of the main women featured in the film committed suicide a couple of years ago after falling back into anorexia makes it all the more haunting to watch.

This promotional video shows a brief insight into life at the treatment centre and Greenfield talks about why she did the project