Facebook X Email Print Save Story About midway through “Social Studies,” Lauren Greenfield’s new five-part FX docuseries about teens and their relationship to social media, we see one of the show’s protagonists—an eighteen-year-old University of Arizona freshman named Sydney—as she exercises on an elliptical machine at the gym. Wearing a gray tank top and black short shorts, with her hair tied back in a high ponytail, Sydney works out while striking poses for her phone camera and posting the images she captures to Snapchat. We watch all this from the P.
O.V. of Sydney’s phone lens, and her living-my-best-life selfies fill our screen as she takes them, their stop-and-start rhythm matched by the immersive beat of the dance music that scores the scene.
But then the soundtrack suddenly stops, and we turn to a full body shot of Sydney from a slight distance. Though she’s still exercising, still posing for the iPhone she holds aloft, her head cocked prettily in one direction and then the other, there is an almost comical chasm between the world that is recorded on her device and the world outside it. The illusion of energetic seduction is gone, and, instead, we are keenly aware of the dull labor that goes into creating it.
With the music now silenced, Sydney’s ballet mécanique is accompanied only by the faint squeaking of the elliptical’s shifting gears. The moment is signature Greenfield. Since the early nineteen-nineties, the Los Angeles-based photographer an.
