In 2007, the photographer Lauren Greenfield was sent by Elle magazine to shoot the opening of a Versace store in Beverly Hills. A trio of women who had come together quickly caught her attention, each carrying a variation of a gold lamé Versace handbag. The resulting image — a shot of them from the neck down beaming in on the leather and fur, the big rings and body-skimming dresses — acquired an unforeseen longevity, appearing in other magazines and eventually in museum exhibits of Ms. Greenfield’s work, as a symbol of the latest unsettling chapter in gilded American prosperity.
One of the women in the picture was Jackie Siegel, the wife of a much older Florida real estate impresario, with whom she shared seven children, a plane and an initiative to build the largest house in the country, on the outskirts of Disney World. At the time, she was one of Versace’s biggest clients and Ms. Greenfield was among the art world’s most admired portraitists of wealth in overdrive and the disparities it was powering.
So in 2009, finding herself in Florida on assignment, this time to photograph the wives of white-collar criminals, Ms. Greenfield remembered Ms. Siegel and got in touch. What followed was an extended immersion with her family, culminating in the improbably sympathetic 2012 documentary “The Queen of Versailles,” which has evolved, perhaps less predictably, into a new Broadway musical starring Kristin Chenoweth.
It arrives at a moment when pride in outsize expenditure has been normalized in so many quarters, when, as Ms. Greenfield said during a recent visit to New York, “we have gotten farther and farther away from the value of modesty.” She had flown in from Los Angeles, where she lives, to attend rehearsals for the show and a packed screening and subsequent conversation about the originating artifact. What is striking about the film so many years later is the deft way it telegraphs both compassion and quiet admonition. Ms. Greenfield doesn’t hate the player. But she hates the game, having rejected whatever temptation might have existed to cast her subject’s hunger as crude, soulless venality.
For a short while, Ms. Greenfield thought that her film might work as an opera. The pathos and melodrama were all there — the emotional highs and lows of a material ambition born of a certain adolescent longing. Ms. Siegel grew up in a small town in upstate New York, the daughter of a night-shift worker, and came of age in the Reagan ’80s, when much of the country seemed to be barreling toward big money, while many others were stuck where they began.
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The post Lauren Greenfield, the Queen of Capturing Our Versailles appeared first on New York Times.
