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Photographer Lauren Greenfield, known for documenting cultural attitudes about women and their bodies, followed four women with eating disorders at Renfrew, a residential treatment facility in Florida. Her documentary, 'Thin,' chronicles their stories and will premiere on HBO on November 14, 2006 at 9PM ET. Here, we caught up to the filmmaker to ask her about the project and to share what she learned about this devastating illness.
Q: What inspired you to make this film?
LG: The idea grew out of my last book, 'Girl Culture.' I spent five years photographing women across America and their "body projects" -- how they use their bodies to express themselves with everything from fashion to sex to eating disorders. I was really struck by some of the women I met with eating disorders and wanted to delve into their stories and explore this [illness] -- the most pathological of body projects. It was a story that I couldn't tell well as I wanted to in photographs, but I could tell in a film.
Q: What was the most surprising thing you learned in making the documentary?
LG: One thing that really shocked me was that the experts say it takes about four to seven years to recover from an eating disorder. Yet, the average insurance policy pays for three weeks of treatment. That's a huge disconnect. And you see in the film, that three of the women have crises related to insurance. That kind of stress took away from the quality of treatment because they were so worried about whether or not they could continue. Some of them would be on the phone begging their insurance carriers for just one more day of treatment. It's hard to make progress in treatment when you feel you can't stay the course.
Q: In making the film, did you come to any conclusions about the causes of eating disorders?
LG: Each woman had her own story and I didn't want the viewer to come away with a straight causal relationship. Every woman has different triggers -- one subject talked about the pressures on women in the South, for another it was issues with her mother. There are lots of stories of abuse, trauma and divorce. And one woman told me, "Nothing like abuse ever happened to me, I just wanted to be thin."
I think it's a complex mix of genetics, family dynamics, personal history and personality. It has nothing to do with mainstream concerns and media pressure. I certainly think our social values play a role, but I don't think that's what's triggering a full-blown eating disorder.
Q: Our country is heavier than ever, yet eating disorders are also on the rise. How do you make sense of that?
LG: There are lots of contradictions: As a culture we're obsessed with food and thinness. Eat but don't eat. In Renfrew, they are treating women who are anorexic and also women who are binge eaters. Different women have different eating disorders -- some are skeletal and some are heavy. But both disorders are coping mechanisms using food to numb intolerable pain.
Photographer Lauren Greenfield is the author of Girl Culture. 'Thin' is her first film and is also a book.