Generation wealth: how the modern world fell in love with money

#TIA – It may not surprise you to know that people would rather be rich than poor. But filthy rich to the extent of today’s wealthy? Read on.

“Documentary photographer Lauren Greenfield was trying to form trusting relationships with members of a Mayan tribe in Mexico in the early 1990s when she picked up a discarded copy of Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero. Before she’d finished the cult novel – which charts the parties, drug taking and sex lives of rich college kids in Los Angeles – Greenfield had decided to swap photography subjects from the Maya of Chiapas to the rich kids of her home town.

A quarter of a century later, Greenfield has amassed 500,000 images of the often absurd lives of the wealthy. The highlights – including a picture of go-go dancers hired for a 13-year-old’s bar mitzvah – are published by Phaidon in a £60 2.5kg tome called Generation Wealth. An accompanying behind-the-scenes documentary film is released in the UK next week.”

Read more at The Guardian