A Look at The Ugly Side of Getting RichGeneration Wealth, the career-spanning monograph of photographer Lauren Greenfield, documents the spending habits of the 1 percent.
by James Tarmy
In one photograph, the German-born, Harvard-educated hedge fund manager Florian Homm, who made and lost a personal fortune of more than $800 million, poses in a German brothel that he once co-owned. In another, Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines accused of stealing billions from state coffers, sits in her Manila apartment beneath a gold-framed Picasso. Later on, a 43-year-old Chinese billionaire Huang Qiaoling is pictured walking from his mansion, built as a full-scale replica of the White House, to his chauffeured Mercedes S Class.
Dozens more similarly lavish and disconcerting vignettes fill Generation Wealth (Phaidon, 2017), a 504-page monograph by Lauren Greenfield and out on May 15. A photographer who has spent the last 25 years documenting wealth, class, and status symbols, she offers a glimpse into the spending habits of ultra-wealthy tribes: hedge fund managers in New York such as “Suzanne,” whom Greenfield follows for several years as she attempts to have a child; entertainment executives like Brett Ratner, who is shown on St. Barts with a platinum American Express card stuck to his forehead; industrialists such as Italian apparel billionaire Renzo Rosso, who shows off the home gym in his 18th century villa; and “time-share king” David Siegel, who, with his wife Jackie, would go on to become the subject of Greenfield’s documentary, Queen of Versailles.
Greenfield’s photos, accompanied by essays and interviews, kick off in 1990s Los Angeles at the moment Beverly Hills debutantes and Compton rappers were swapping cultural aspirations, and as plastic surgery was trickling from the purview of aging socialites down to image-obsessed teenagers. One Malibu teen, photographed at a pool party three days after her nose job, says: “Out of my 10 close friends, six of us got something done.”
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