September, 2026.-For three decades Lauren Greenfield has documented American consumer culture at close range – the way media and social contagion shape image, appetite, and identity. Social Studies, opening at Fotografiska Berlin on September 25, carries that project to its frontier: the phone, and the first generation to come of age inside it.
Between 2021 and 2023, Greenfield spent 150 days with thirty teenagers from ten Los Angeles high schools, who gave her access to their phones. What she gathered – more than 2,000 hours of screen recordings, alongside the feeds, texts, and images most of them had never shown their parents – became the archive the exhibition is drawn from.
At the center is Greenfield’s own photography – the portraiture and reportage she has been making for thirty years, now turned on a generation raised to catalogue itself. Building on that signature work, she expands outward: typologies composited from the teenagers’ social media – the selfie, the beauty trend, the confession – where the private post becomes a public document and the single picture resolves into a pattern; a suite of new video works, Trend Studies, extending the collection of feeds forward through 2026; and immersive installations that transform the ideas and data into rooms you can viscerally experience. It is the first time Greenfield has set immersive projections and built environments beside her photographs in a gallery.
In the “Ella’s Bedroom” installation, string lights, stuffed animals, and an overstuffed closet are overtaken by the feeds running across the walls. Greenfield’s “Algorithm Room” gives the experience of being in someone else’s feed, at architectural scale, so that the rabbit hole hidden inside a six-inch screen becomes something a group falls down together. A final gallery presents all five episodes of the Social Studies docuseries, first released by FX and Disney+ in 2024.
“Social Studies is my latest and deepest investigation into how media and popular culture transform coming of age – and the first written from inside the phone,” Greenfield says. The archive and teenage testimonies provide the data and evidence. “Social media is our lifeline, but it’s also a loaded gun,” one participant offers – the power of the exhibition is giving the generation that was experimented on a voice. The harm and the addiction are here, and so is the loneliness underneath them, told by the people it happened to. It arrives as Europe debates limits on minors’ access to social platforms.
In Conversation with the World of Advertising
Those in the advertising industry may know Greenfield best as the founder of commercial production company Institute, and director of viral ad campaigns including Always’ “#LikeAGirl” – recently voted by Ad Age readers as the best Super Bowl spot of all time. Her exhibition at Fotografiska Berlin runs concurrently with this year’s Ciclope Festival, where Greenfield is set to deliver the opening keynote on October 6. On October 7, all Ciclope attendees are invited to a private walkthrough of the exhibition with Greenfield, followed by a reception.
The Beauty Machine
Installed in the museum entry is the Beauty Machine, created by Greenfield with Dove and Ogilvy and first sited at Waterloo Station, London, on March 31, 2026, where it invited passersby to pay with their face before dispensing a mask. It extends Greenfield’s longtime work on media, culture, identity, and the ever-increasing pressure to live up to often unrealistic standards, here under algorithmic acceleration.
Educational Initiatives for Teens
Fotografiska Berlin is partnering with the Education Innovation Lab, Adenauer Campus, and FAQ YOU on a series of city-wide educational and health initiatives including interactive workshops with young Berliners, a new digital learning resource for schools, free exhibition visits for students, and an out of home (OOH) campaign. Together, these efforts extend the conversation beyond the museum, fostering meaningful dialogue, critical reflection, and change.
New Monograph on The Queen of Versailles
Additionally, Greenfield’s latest monograph will be published in October, and available at Fotografiska Berlin throughout the exhibition’s run. In The Queen of Versailles: An American Allegory (Lannoo, October 2026) Greenfield deconstructs her 2012 documentary and 2025 Broadway musical of the same name, exploring themes of excess, cancel culture, Trump’s influence, and much more.
