I grew up in Los Angeles and moved away for college and lived in a few different places after college. I started thinking about going back to the place I grew up in and photographing my own experience. I thought if I photographed something I actually knew about and cared about in a deeper way this would be more productive. I had this revelation that I was spending so much time just trying to get to the point where I could even make pictures. We had a connection with the subject, but I felt an outsider struggling with language and access. Afterwards I did a project on the Mayan Indians in Chiapas, Mexico, where I worked with my mother who had been researching there for twenty years. I was thinking, “Wow, that’s not for me!” But I started to figure it out when I was at National Geographic. I was told by one of my teachers in college that to start as a journalist you really have to go to a war – that’s how you cut your teeth and get known.

There is a tradition of documenting the other, the exotic, in photojournalism. It was the first place where I saw the photographer as the primary storyteller, the one doing the research and telling the story. When I went there it was the first time I saw a photographer as a journalist – up to that point I had not taken photography seriously as a career because I thought it was about illustrating other people’s stories. I got a photo internship from National Geographic. I was about social documentary, telling stories of how people lived. So I did not come into this work as an artist or conceptual image-maker. I did this project about the French aristocracy in photographs, and photography proved to be a very accessible medium I could just take my camera and tape recorder and make pictures and interview people and document how they lived. I decided I wanted to do filmmaking, applied to film schools and tried to get grants, but nothing worked out.

I realized I was interested in culture – that was my calling – but I did not know how to express this. This gave me a year going around the world studying film and anthropology, living with families in nine countries. I went to Harvard, not art school, and studied social studies and then visual anthropology. I did not start with just photography and I am not ending up with it, as I make films as well, but it has been the dominant expression for me.

Thin by lauren greenfield