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seokjingiggles · 6 years

Text

Caramel Macchiato

genre: fluff

member: taehyung

words: 1924

One sinful tennis all-star and an adorable puppy to-go please.

It was your final year in high school. Just a few more months of being stuck in this shithole school in this shithole town and then you would be free. You didn’t necessarily know what you would pursue after high school, nor did you really care. You just wanted to get away from the same old cliques, the same old “can you believe she slept with that guy?!,” the same old horny as hell teenage boys that just wanted to get in any girl’s pants…just thinking about the cliche toxins of high school made you recoil as you sat on the cold bleachers facing the tennis courts.

You shivered in the crisp autumn evening. The digital clock on your phone read 5:15 pm. You closed your eyes momentarily and imagined taking a hot bath and curling up under several blankets in your bed with a good book. Your dream could only be fulfilled after dropping off your best friend, the girls’ all-star tennis champion, Julie, at her home. Although waiting for Julie and the rest of the girls’ team to finish practice for the past four years has snatched two hours away from you everyday, you enjoyed having those two hours to be alone with your thoughts and far away from reality.

The soft, repetitive pinging of tennis balls and the shuffling of feet provided serene background noise to accompany your thoughts. This evening, the topic of your imagination was the hot barista from the cafe near your school. The first time you saw him was a week ago while waiting in line to order. He seemed young enough to be in high school, but his appearance was a sinful gift from the devil. You giggled at the thought of his goofy smile and how his eyes crinkled when he gave people their drinks. His somewhat messy brown hair curled ever so slightly under his cap. Under the innocent uniform of a baseball cap and a green apron lay muscular thighs and arms that stretched the tight, black clothing he wore. His jeans had rips in the knees and a little scab peeked out from one of the holes. Every movement of his arms revealed his toned biceps. Within what felt like three seconds, you found yourself at the front of the line, cheeks flushed and eyes wide as the hot mystery barista across the counter smiled kindly and awaited your order.

“Miss? Are you ready to order?” His dark eyes drifted to the growing line behind you.

“Huh? Oh yeah sorry, can I get a…” In your flustered state, you completely forgot what you were planning to order. While you frantically searched the menu for a drink, you could feel his burning stare on you. All you wanted to do was get your drink and scurry the hell out of there.

“Do you have caramel macchiatos here?” you blurted.

The barista hesitated for a moment, chuckled, and said, “No, unfortunately. We only sell black coffee here.”

“O-oh, okay then…I’ll have a tall black coffee I guess.” You hated black coffee.

“I’m just kidding silly! What kind of cafe only sells black coffee? They wouldn’t make a profit!”

As if your cheeks couldn’t get any redder, your entire face became a huge tomato. How could sharing the same presence as this boy make you act so clueless? He was right, who the fuck buys black coffee? The boy giggled at your embarrassed state and grabbed a plastic cup.

“So one tall caramel macchiato. Name, please?” Cup and marker in hand, he glanced at you through his bangs.

“Y/N.” The only thing you’ve managed to say without sounding like a total idiot was your name.

“Y/N,” he repeated as he scribbled your name on the cup.

You reached into your bag for your wallet. By the time you pulled out your card to pay, he had already whisked away to the brewing station.

“Don’t worry,” he called out to you, “it’s on the house.”

Before you could playback any further into the memory of the “Barista Boy Encounter,” you were being pulled off of the bleachers by Julie.

“Y/N, stop daydreaming and unlock the car, it’s freezing balls out here,” Julie whined.

The two of you grabbed your belongings and headed for your car. Julie blasted the heat as you turned on the engine.

It was the boys’ tennis team’s turn to practice now. A few of the boys walked in front of your car on their way to the courts. You knew all of them; the tall one with huge shoulders was their number one player, the annoying but insanely hot fuckboy was known for lying about scores, and the short one hosted the craziest parties on Fridays. This time, however, there was another boy walking with them. He was tall and had long legs and huge hands. The tennis bag slung over his shoulder seemed minuscule in comparison to his tall figure. Someone must’ve made a joke because his mouth widened into a boxy grin and he clapped his hands together.

Julie reached over to the driver’s side and honked your horn impatiently.

“Hurry up, dumbasses!” Julie huffed.

Three out of the four boys ran towards the courts while the unfamiliar one lingered behind and glanced in your direction. Through your dimmed windshield, you got a better look at the boy. His face flashed with confusion as a wave of recognition drowned you.

The hot barista from the other day was also the hot tennis player standing in front of you. With a smirk, he waved at you and ran to catch up with the other boys. You sat in silence for a moment as you recollected your thoughts.

“Do you know that guy? He’s kinda cute! Is he new?” Julie asked, also feeling pretty overwhelmed.

“Remember that barista guy?” You stammered.

“No fucking way! Y/N, he was flirting with you and now’s your chance to have the high school romance of your dreams! Jimin always invites everyone from the tennis teams so if you come with me to his party Friday night I can set you up! What’s his name? Ooh, please let it be something sexy, I swear to god if he’s an Arnold like the last one I’ll scream!” Julie exclaimed.

You pressed on the gas and tried to remember what his name tag said.

“Definitely not Arnold. It was something long and I think it started with a T.”

Julie groaned. “You don’t even know his name? No wonder you’ve only had one boyfriend in your entire life. You have no idea how to flirt.”

The next morning you paid extra attention to your outfit. Now that you knew Hot Barista Dude went to your school and that you had someone to impress, you actually cared about your appearance for once. Senioritis would not be the death of you today. You took a picture of your loose t-shirt, skinny jeans, and oversized jacket and sent it to Julie for confirmation. If you really wanted to get close to this boy, Julie would have to help you. Afterall, she was the girl every boy in the school swooned over. She knew perhaps a little too much about relationships.

You arrived to class with a cup of coffee in one hand and a physics textbook in the other. Once you got to your desk, you opened your textbook to study. Little did you know, someone had plopped into the seat next to yours and was reaching for your coffee cup.

“Starbucks? Really? You didn’t like my caramel macchiato?”

You were pulled from your trance by a large hand snatching your cup and taking a sip from it. His lips wrapped around your straw in the exact place where your red lipstick stained the green plastic tube. Your eyes slowly trailed up his face until you were greeted by two puppy dog eyes.

Goddamnit. It was him.

He swished the coffee in his mouth and returned your cup. “Caramel macchiato with extra caramel and almond milk. Interesting choice.”

“You got all that from one sip? I didn’t know baristas had superpowers.”

He chuckled. “I didn’t know I would get to see the pretty girl from the coffee shop either.” You could feel your cheeks turning red.

Before you could reply, your physics teacher began passing out a physics exam.

You overheard him talking to the barista boy.

“Are you the new student I keep hearing about? I heard you transferred because our school begged to have the number one tennis player in the area on our team. I’m guessing that’s you?”

“Uhhh yeah, guess that’s me. I’m Taehyung.”

“Welcome then! Since it’s your first day, I’ll let this exam slide but make sure to read chapter 14 before next class! Y/N will show you around until you get the hang of things, isn’t that right, Y/N?”

Your calculation of the velocity of a basketball was interrupted by the sound of your name. Taehyung smirked at you and you nodded your head a little too vigorously.

“Sure, I guess I wouldn’t mind giving you a tour of our fascinating school.” Taehyung caught your sarcasm and giggled.

“Okay, back to work!” Your teacher exclaimed and patted Taehyung’s shoulder.

All you could think about for the rest of class was how Taehyung called you pretty. It would be safe to say you failed that physics test.

Finally, the bell rang. Luckily, your next period was study hall so you could get to know this Taehyung guy. Taehyung checked his phone while you were packing your bags. His lockscreen was a picture of a fluffy puppy with its tongue sticking out.

“Oh my god, that puppy is so cute! Is it yours?” You exclaimed hands clasped over your mouth in adoration.

“Yeah! His name is Yeontan! I got him as a present for winning regionals a few months ago. He’s adorable, isn’t he?” Taehyung stood closer to you so you could get a better look at the picture on his phone. His shoulder brushed against yours and you devoured the smell of his crisp cologne. He opened up an album titled “YEONTANIE~~” and scrolled through a few photos. If he weren’t standing next to you, you would’ve been texting up a storm to Julie about how hard you were falling for this boy. From the coffee shop moment to the fact that he doesn’t hold back from blatantly flirting with you to the fact that his best friend was his puppy, all of it screamed boyfriend material.

“Shouldn’t we get going, Y/N?” Taehyung turned to you and playfully tugged on a strand of your hair.

“Yeah, totally forgot we were in school…follow me!” You grabbed his arm and briskly speed-walked out of the classroom. On your way to the library, girls stopped in their tracks and whispered to their friends.

“Holy shit, who is he?” “You think he’s single?” “No way, look at how he’s ogling over the girl he’s with.”

Through the corner of your eye, you could tell that Taehyung was staring at you. You blushed, for the millionth time, and let go of his arm. He lunged forward and opened the library door for you.

“This way, mademoiselle,” Taehyung said in a goofy French accent.

Although the two of you had only known each other for a few hours, there was some connection between you two that made you feel so comfortable being around him.

“Thanks,” you said, blushing.

“The pleasure is all mine.”

Two weeks after I promised I would post…wow good job me ;)

I wanna make a pt 2 so lmk if you would like one!

Thank you for reading! ♥✰

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c-valentino · 7 years

Text

Splashes Of Paint

Chapter 2

Fandom: All For the Game - Nora Sakavic

Rating: T

Characters:

Kevin Day, Betsy Dobson, Riko Moriyama, Andrew Minyard, Aaron Minyard

Chapter Two - Brushstrokes

One by one they come, his new teammates. One by one they judge him. Only Andrew is a constant presence in the background, his second shadow. He is the smell of cigarette smoke, a mouth that twists from a bored line into a jackknife smile in a blink of an eye, hazel eyes that never seem to stop criticizing without the need of words. He is also a reassurance and he is the man that keeps Kevin’s demons at bay.

Today it’s his shadow’s twin who comes by to poke his head inside the door of the old, unused storage room with its single window. Aaron doesn’t knock, only pushes the door halfway open and leans in, keeping his balance with one hand gripping the doorframe.

“Andrew, coach is looking for you.” He finds his brother in his usual place, an old wooden chair in the corner next to the window from where he can keep an eye on Kevin, the door, and even half of the striker’s canvas at an odd angle. The goalkeeper is smoking yet another cigarette, even though Kevin wishes he would just quit. They had that argument, once today and at least a dozen other times before.

Andrew only acknowledges his twin brother with a slightly raised eyebrow. These two don’t talk much, Kevin has noticed. He shares a bedroom with them. They had been there first, and when Kevin came under the protection of the goalkeeper, his cousin Nicky had moved out without a word of protest. Andrew’s doing, Kevin supposes.

Aaron lets go of the door and comes in, shoes noisily scuffling over the plastic covers that keep the floor from getting stained with paint. He steers clear of Kevin, giving him as much space as the room allows him to do and leans against the far wall, arms crossed over his chest to have a look at the canvas. By the look on his face Aaron isn’t impressed. And why should he be?

“Uuwaah… that’s rough. Like a toddler bringing pictures home from Kindergarten.” He pronounces the last word in his second language. They do that sometimes, talk German when they want to exclude Kevin from whatever is being said. Aaron does it out of spite, being not too happy about their new sleeping arrangements and Kevin taking on the position as assistant coach, ordering them around, thinking himself their superior. Andrew does it to strategically keep information from Kevin. If the goalkeeper has to say something hurtful or provocative, he will do so to Kevin’s face. He plays a different kind of mind game than his twin. Kevin likes him better for it. He is also the better player, even if he does his utmost best to hide it. Kevin knows it. He has seen what Andrew is capable of before he has joined the Foxes.

“Yeah?” Kevin asks evenly. Falling for Aaron’s baits is the wrong thing to do. He has learned his lesson by now. Still, it stings. Kevin and criticism don’t get along well. Kevin knowing that he sucks at something either leads to instant abandonment of the task or to a quest of fanatical practice and improvement. He is past the point of abandonment by now. What keeps eluding him though is improvement of his painting skills. “Guess you are right,” he says and rips down the canvas. Aaron watches him but keeps his mouth shut for once.

The striker turns to his goalkeeper, wipes his hand on the stained, old jeans he is wearing. “Coach is looking for you,” he repeats Aaron’s words to Andrew. The blonde leans back, balancing his chair on two legs in a lazy demonstration of his uncaring attitude. Kevin rolls his eyes at him. This is a game they have played before. It’s also one of the few he can win. All he has to do is walk out that door and go to see their coach. Andrew will follow to keep an eye on him. They both know it. He gives Andrew ten more seconds to find the less childish way out of this situation. It takes the young man six to paint a wide grin on his face that tells the story of how amused he gets by their little games —thanks to his drugs, most likely— stand up and walk out of the room as if it had been his idea in the first place. Aaron watches them both, not moving from his spot, and then shrugs. Kevin gives him a sideway glance and follows Andrew out.

The other Foxes get curious too. Renee is the first of them, always the first to bridge the gap, to reach out, and tries to talk to him about his paintings. He doesn’t want to talk about them. They are clumsy and he gets annoyed by them. He cannot figure out what he wants to do. Sketching is impossible. His right hand won’t cooperate. So he reaches straight for the brushes. But then he faces the problem of not knowing what he is supposed to paint in the first place. It doesn’t matter, Bee tells him. Whatever comes to your mind, she tries to encourage him. And he has to admit, the feeling of a wet brush touching the canvas and leaving marks of paint on it is strangely satisfying. Only the results in the end are the complete opposite.

Nicky comes by to chat and to check on his cousin, Kevin thinks, but mostly to chat, and Kevin is not in the mood. Andrew isn’t either, and so it takes only minutes until the friendly backliner with the number eight on his new team leaves them again.

Dan comes by to discuss the new exercise regiment he has created for the Foxes. She only glances at his empty canvas before she tells him what she thinks of his (adapted Raven’s) trainings plan. Long story short: she hates it and he doesn’t care what she thinks. He has seen the —as he calls it— sorry state the team is in, and he thinks the team is in desperate need of some discipline and hard work. They argue for twenty minutes straight, until Renee comes to get Dan with an apologetic smile flashing in Kevin’s direction. It’s his therapeutic painting time, is probably what she thinks and Exy can wait. Exy can never wait, is what he thinks, and so he follows them to argue some more.

The others come by once or twice, not really interested, but at least showing some effort to get to know the newest addition to the team. He doesn’t get it though. The only version of him he cares to show them is the one on the court. They don’t need to get along, let alone become friends. All they have to do is listen to him and improve their gameplay.

His canvases meanwhile are covered in vague ideas of landscapes, of shapes even he has no clue what they are supposed to be. It’s just not right yet. He gets more and more frustrated with them, while Andrew keeps watching him.

The goalkeeper is mostly silent in this room. Sometimes Kevin forces some conversation out of him, but a drugged Andrew Minyard isn’t the best choice to have a pleasant conversation with. Smalltalk bores him and deeper topics usually lead straight to mocking because, even though Kevin knows it isn’t true, Andrew seems to take nothing seriously.

This morning the X-ray of his hand has shown that the healing process will take longer than expected. It has been grave news, and Kevin’s mood has suffered more than just a little. He has been agitated all week, looking forward to promising results, to hope of a near comeback, just to have his dreams crushed once again.

Right now he is throwing an Exy ball into the air with his right hand to improve his dexterity, a half finished painting in front of him. He hates it already, hates everything at the moment. Andrew humors him by tossing the ball back and forth once in a while, but when he keeps it and raises his chin at the canvas to tell Kevin that he should finish what they are here for, the striker suddenly loses it. Something in Kevin snaps. There is no other way to describe it, really. His temperament flares and his aggression needs an outlet. He takes the palette knife, grips it like a weapon, and attacks the canvas like he means to murder it. The knife pierces right through, once, twice, three times, and then he rips it downwards, opening a gaping tear in the still wet paint, twists the knife and slices it upwards diagonally. The easel is the next to break. Kevin’s long legs kick it over, send it flying into the wall, and then he comes after it, like a predator coming for its pray. His foot stomps down on it and he hears the wood crack and splinter. He kicks it again, so that it leans pathetically against the wall in the corner, and has another go at it, snapping one of its legs in two. It takes more force than he thought, takes him three kicks and he puts his weight behind them.

Andrew watches him silently but with a grotesquely wide grin on his face, his eyes gleaming with delight over the sudden outburst of Kevin’s aggression. And really, it’s a thing of beauty, watching this pathetic excuse of a man finally showing some teeth and claws. He has been wondering just how fucked up Evermore could have been to turn a young man like Kevin into a covering, sobbing child; still angry, still hurting, but never violent in his anger. And oh, it looks good on him. He wants to congratulate him on finding the first few vertebras of his missing spine, wants to watch him collect them all, and wants to help him threading them back together. He wants to clap and cheer Kevin on, but Kevin is not done yet, and Andrew doesn’t dare to interfere and risk to snap him out of this spell.

Next are the paint pots and brushes. Two pots he kicks over, they are too heavy to be thrown one-handed. The smaller ones he picks up and throws them against the wall, leaving huge splashes of paint in their wake, all the way over the floor and up the wall. The brushes hit the wall next, creating colorful arcs of paint across the whole room when Kevin demonstrates how powerful even his right arm is. Some of the blue paint hits Andrew in his seat, up from his right boot, over both pant legs, his shirt, his chin, ear and hair. He doesn’t even flinch when the cold mess hits his skin and he becomes part of Kevin’s newest creation. What a mess he is creating.

—And then one of the teachers storms in and ruins everything, comes in barking loudly, voice full of authority and Andrew watches as Kevin regresses into the scared child again, whirls around to face the man and takes a step back, holds his broken hand protectively against his chest and starts to realize what he has done. Before the whole apologizing bullshit can even start, Andrew is up on his feet, steps in front of Kevin and faces the teacher. The man’s eyes switch to him in bewilderment. He hasn’t noticed the short goalkeeper sitting motionlessly in the corner before. Now Andrew comes straight at him and doesn’t stop until the teacher takes a step back and stands in the hallway again. Andrew follows him out and shuts the door behind them, leaving Kevin alone in the room.

<<back next>>

#tfc fanfic #aftg fanfic #kevin day #andrew minyard #riko moriyama #artistic Kevin #cval madness

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realestate63141 · 7 years

Text

Photographer Spent 25 Years Documenting Our Absurd Obsession With Wealth

Photographer Lauren Greenfield was rummaging through approximately half a million photos she’d taken over the past 25 years. The images chronicle the Western world’s spiraling obsession with consumption and celebrity, part of her extensive project “Generation Wealth.” Specifically, Greenfield was looking for potentially overlooked connections to help round out her visual story, which starts with MTV-crazed teenagers and ends somewhere around the election of President Donald Trump.

Greenfield zeroed in on a photo she had previously disregarded, showing a group of bored looking preteens huddled in the hallway of a Los Angeles private school dance, wearing ripped jeans, T-shirts and plaid button-downs. When she took the photo in 1992, Greenfield recognized two of the partygoers as the daughters of O.J. Simpson’s lawyer, but didn’t think much of it. Looking back, she realized she’d unwittingly captured Kim and Kourtney Kardashian, two individuals who embody the very dreams of status and spectacle she’d spent decades exploring.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Greenfield expanded upon the Kardashian’s immense influence over contemporary generations. To explain, she cites sociologist and economist Juliet Schor, who wrote the introduction to Greenfield’s monograph. “According to Schor, in America, people used to compare themselves to the person down the road,” she said. “Someone who had a little bit more than they did. Keeping up with the Joneses.”

Today, however, we’re no longer comparing ourselves with our neighbors, but with the chimerical images we encounter on TV screens and social media feeds. As Greenfield put it: “Now we’re ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians,’ comparing our houses to what we see on ‘MTV Cribs.’” The latter reference is a bit dated, but it brings us back to the project’s origins in 1992, when Greenfield first began documenting her hometown of Los Angeles.

Greenfield returned to LA after completing her first photographic assignment as an intern for National Geographic. She’d been documenting a Zinacantec Maya village in Mexico ― an “exotic” culture she knew little about. “I realized I wanted to come back to my hometown and photograph my own culture,” she said. So she returned to her high school, Crossroads, an elite private school frequented by families with Hollywood ties, whose students were constantly competing with blowout Bar Mitzvahs, expensive cars and designer purses.

Greenfield’s first series, “Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood,” focuses on the impact of media saturation on youth culture in LA. “It was the beginning of MTV,” Greenfield said. “I was seeing how rich kids, influenced by hip-hop, wanted to be like the kids of the inner city with this idea of ‘bling,’” she said. Those same kids living in inner cities, in turn, yearned to be rich. The series revealed that the appeal of wealth and fame crossed boundaries of race, class or background; most young Los Angelenos were driven by a desire for status and attention.

“Money affects kids in many ways,” Adam, a 13-year-old subject of Greenfield’s, explained to her in a 1994 interview, the first she ever conducted. In the photo alongside Adam’s interview, he’s pictured as a pudgy pubescent grinding with a go-go dancer at his nightclub-themed Bar Mitzvah. “It has ruined a lot of kids I know,” he continued. “It has ruined me — wearing a Rolex watch to school or just buying a $200 pair of shoes. I take flying lessons. I mean, I know a person who has a soccer field and an indoor basketball court. But that person’s dad is going to jail.”

Greenfield recalled the impact Adam’s words had on her back in 1994. “I was so amazed by the acute perceptions that a kid right in the middle of it had,” she said. “I was very moved that he could see it and be critical of it and still be affected by it.”

Greenfield has interviewed and photographed young people in bathtubs and dressing rooms, at weight loss camps and eating disorder clinics, in the middle of a face lift, and just after a chemical peel ― the “Rolls Royce of rejuvenation” ― their face still coral and bubbling. “They are the truth tellers in this work,” Greenfield said, referring to her subjects. “The story, for the most part, is in their words.”

“I would say usually the people are comfortable because they kind of have to be to do this work,” Greenfield put it. To earn their trust, her process entails a lot of, in her words, hanging out. She spends weeks, months or even years with her subjects, waiting to catch that single shot that communicates something bigger. “There is no staging, there is only capturing moments. For me, it’s about trying to find moments that speak to the culture. Sometimes I understand the photos’ significance at the time, oftentimes I don’t.”

Greenfield’s extensive photographic project features 14 chapters, each focusing on a particular population, fixation or epidemic. “New Aging” explores society’s rejection of aging and the ways medicine and technology conspire to prevent its effects. In one image, a woman receives a post-operative mani-pedi in a luxury surgery-aftercare facility, her entire face covered by a mask of bandages with holes for her eyes, nose and mouth.

“The Princess Brand” documents how even the innocent exercise of playing dress-up initiates young girls’ obsessions with luxury and desirability. Greenfield captures girls as young as 4 years old, wearing their mothers’ high heels, striking a seductive pose for the camera. Juxtaposed with “New Aging,” the series hints at how aging adults and young girls chase the same impossible ideal.

“I started to think about the connections,” Greenfield said. “The connection between a little girl and her precocious sexualization and the woman who decides to become a prostitute because she doesn’t want to make $20,000 a year anymore as a social worker, to Jackie Siegel, who decides being a beauty queen will get her closer to the American dream than her engineering degree.”

The various threads of Greenfield’s story converged during the financial crash of 2008, when her anthropological experiment suddenly resembled a morality tale. “We had lost sight of what is important and what really matters,” she said. “The crash was an opportunity to take stock of that and document this pain, pain that stretched from the working class to the ultra rich.”

The following year, Greenfield made the documentary film “The Queen of Versailles,” which follows time-share mogul David Siegel and his third wife, Jackie, after their quest to build the largest home in the country was brutally interrupted by financial turmoil.

“In the new house it’s going to be hard to communicate with each other,” Jackie says in one interview. “Even in this house, I could scream right now and no one would hear me. I could yell for Marissa to come here, and she wouldn’t come. I have to use my cell phone. In the new house, we will have Segways to go around the house.”

Although there are urgent moral undertones to Greenfield’s project, she never casts judgment on her individual subjects. Rather, she portrays every person, from a former assembly line worker at General Motors to the sex worker famous for citing Charlie Sheen as a client, as reflections of the same cultural phenomenon. “We’re all susceptible to it,” Greenfield said. “We all become addicted.”

Greenfied’s book includes an interview with social critic Chris Hedges, who illuminates just how pervasive our generation’s preoccupation with status has become. “Celebrity culture functions like a religion,” he said, continuing:

“For one thousand years the Catholic Church ruled Europe by creating massive stained-glass windows with images of torment and hell and damnation and salvation to control society. Today we have electronic images of celebrity and wealth that do the same thing. We worship narcissistic monsters. The drive to become a celebrity is at its core a drive to become immortal. What you’re seeking is an unattainable perfection. You’re seeking essentially to become a god.”

Of course, people react to the cult of celebrity differently, with certain populations more susceptible than others. “I think the power of capitalism, and exploiting addiction in general, is looking for insecurities and weaknesses,” Greenfield said. “Everybody that has insecurities becomes a very good consumer. The way marketing works is, if you buy this thing, it will fix what you feel is missing.”

She continued to express that, though both men and women are prone to the bottomless desire for acquisition, women are societally conditioned to determine their self-worth based on their desirability. As a result, they sometimes veer from coveting commodities to becoming commodities themselves. The last chapter in the series, “Make It Rain,” visualizes this sentiment, peering into nightclubs where men shower cash onto nude dancers’ bodies.

Today, Greenfield’s series inevitably calls to mind Trump’s rise to power ― and whether it was really that shocking at all. “It was kind of amazing because I was finishing the work over the past year while I was watching his campaign and, then, seeing him take the highest office in the land,” Greenfield recalled, “it was almost like an uncanny expression of what the work is about — proof that it was all real.”

Trump, with his gold-plated skyscrapers and his penchant for treating women as property, is the living embodiment of “Generation Wealth.” As Greenfield put it: “His brand mixes business and celebrity and beauty pageants and power and real estate and your name as big as possible. He represented all the values of the work in their most extreme form ― his addiction to attention and admiration and even his use of Twitter.”

The sweeping “Generation Wealth” exhibition, featuring 195 prints and 42 first-person interviews, goes on view at the Annenberg Space for Photography next month. The show is based in the heart of Los Angeles, a mere five miles from Greenfield’s high school. The photos offer authentic portrayals of artifice and abundance in their many manifestations. Either dazzling or deeply disturbing, the series, 25 years in the making, offers a gold-encrusted portrait of our time.

“I hope this provokes discussion about our values and where we are going,” Greenfield said. “It’s clear our current path is unsustainable ― environmentally and morally. It’s a value system that leads to exhaustion, collapse, and no satisfaction.”

“Generation Wealth” runs from April 8 to Aug. 13 at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles. You can also pre-order Phaidon’s “Generation Wealth” monograph here.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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repwinpril9y0a1 · 7 years

Text

Photographer Spent 25 Years Documenting Our Absurd Obsession With Wealth

“Generation Wealth” runs from April 8 to Aug. 13 at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles. You can also pre-order Phaidon’s “Generation Wealth” monograph here.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2lTgnlM

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repwincoml4a0a5 · 7 years

Text

Photographer Spent 25 Years Documenting Our Absurd Obsession With Wealth

“Generation Wealth” runs from April 8 to Aug. 13 at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles. You can also pre-order Phaidon’s “Generation Wealth” monograph here.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2lTgnlM

#DIYS

0 notes