The Big H

Lauren Greenfield's large-format color photographs exist in a strange middle ground between documentary and traditionally posed work. Greenfield spent four years on her project "Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood" photographing teen-agers in Los Angeles. Her subjects find themselves caught up in cycles of preparation -- primping, perfecting, and posing for the big event that never really happens, unless you consider being photographed an event.

All this ritualized experience is captured in Greenfield's snapshots. At modeling tryouts, proms, and parties, the emphasis in these teens' lives is -- as with their Hollywood counterparts -- being looked at, and pleasing onlookers with their fictitious selves. But it's not the naturalism of these youths' culturally produced expressions that's amazing. Instead, it's the adults who creep into the photographs' backgrounds. Utterly complicit, they've provided either the neglect or the extensions of their own vanities -- the cars, the personal trainers, and the neuroses -- that set the scenes Greenfield documents. "Fast Forward" is up through Nov. 14 at the Scott Nichols Gallery, 49 Geary (at Kearny), Fourth Floor, S.F. Admission is free; call 788-4641.

-- Marcy Freedman