The Observer
June 6, 2025
by Killian Fox
The big picture: Lauren Greenfield’s prom portrait
The photographer turns her camera on the LA teens whose image is a carefully curated construct
The teens in Lauren Greenfield’s photo series Social Studies don’t do proms by halves. Eighteen-year-old Keshawn Domingo, a DJ and budding TikTok star, turns up to his in a red tailored suit and white loafers. “I look like something straight out of a movie,” he remarks, in Greenfield’s five-part docuseries of the same name. “Even on Instagram I don’t see nobody all [in] red.” He and his cousin Camara, his date for the evening, do several pre-prom photoshoots. Here, they pose in front of a Vegas-style fountain flanked by two imposing black-suited men with earpieces – because, Keshawn reasons, “everyone looks nicer with a security guard”.
In the series, shot in Los Angeles during the 2021-22 school year, Greenfield (director of The Queen of Versailles and Generation Wealth) examines how social media has taken over the lives of a generation that don’t remember a world without it.
From morning to night, Keshawn and his schoolmates are glued to their phones, monitoring their peers and promoting an online version of themselves that’s often starkly at odds with reality. Underlying the glammed-up, Facetuned surface lie the messier problems of failed college applications, break-ups and body issues that are in many cases exacerbated by social media’s culture of comparison.
Behind his online persona, Keshawn is dealing with young fatherhood and the pressure to graduate. Even the pre-prom photoshoot is not quite as it seems – the “security guards” are actually Keshawn’s cousins AJ and Jay, playing a part. But it would be a mistake to conclude that these teens have been completely undone by the algorithms. Over the course of the TV series, its subjects confront social media’s ills – and in some cases push back. Others turn it to their advantage. Since filming with Greenfield, Keshawn has played gigs and released a number of singles to further his bid for musical stardom. Maybe one day he’ll be hiring bodyguards for real.
Social Studies is at the Fahey/Klein gallery in Los Angeles until 5 July. Greenfield’s docuseries, also called Social Studies, is streaming now on Disney+