For the past three years, Lauren Greenfield  has been putting together a retrospective exhibition looking back at a 25-year career in which she has established herself as one of the leading documentary photographers of her time.

“But weirdly, the show is going to introduce my photography to a lot of people for the first time,” she says.

Within the photography world, Greenfield is known for groundbreaking work stretching back to her 1997 book Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood, a look at youth culture in the age of hip hop and MTV that earned her the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for Young Photographer. She followed that with her 2002 book Girl Culture, a complex and moving study of gender and identity, and other projects like Beauty CULTure and Thin, which examined body-image issues and eating disorders. Over the years, her work — on subjects ranging from child beauty pageants and Bikram yoga to the housing-foreclosure crisis in California — has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, National Geographic, Stern, Elle and other magazines.

But the photography world is, in relative terms, a small one. To a far wider audience, Greenfield is known for her 2012 documentary feature film Queen of Versailles, which examined how the 2008 economic crash affected the life of a Florida billionaire and his wife, David and Jackie Siegel, as they built a 90,000-square-foot house. The film was selected as the opening night documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, while Greenfield won the festival’s Directing Award.

What she may be best known for today, however, is a commercial she created for Procter & Gamble’s Always brand. The three-minute “Like a Girl” spot, a humorous but ultimately devastating contemplation of gender stereotypes, amassed 85 million hits globally after it premiered on the Internet in June of 2014 and became one of the most honored ads of the year, winning six Clio Awards and 14 individual awards at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, among a host of other awards.

On Saturday, a 60-second version of the spot, broadcast during the 2015 Super Bowl, won an Emmy Award for commercials.

“At some point,” commented Adweek, “they'll have to start inventing new prizes to give to Leo Burnett's "Like a Girl" campaign for Procter & Gamble's Always.”

Its impact has been enormous. “The ad turned into a rallying cry for girls and became part of the culture,” Greenfield says. “Procter & Gamble did followup research showing that six months after it was released, the number of people who thought the phrase “like a girl” was a negative had dropped by a huge percentage.”

As she prepares her retrospective, Greenfield has come to see the ad as one of the turning points in her career. “As a documentary photographer, I’ve always done commercial work to support personal projects,” she says, “but making this spot ended up causing more social change than anything I’d done before.”

Making It Rain

The idea for the retrospective began to form in Greenfield’s mind in 2010, as she was working on Queen of Versailles.

“That film started out as a look at the American Dream on steroids,” she says. “David and Jackie Siegel were both rags-to-riches people, and the house they built was an expression of their identities.” When David Siegel’s business fortunes turned south and his dream was shattered, Greenfield began to see connections with other stories she’d worked on — from a project on the fallout of the financial crisis in Dubai to her look at hip-hop bling culture to her projects about the beauty industry.

“The crash of 2008 turned the stories I’d worked on into morality tales,” Greenfield says. “At that point, I wanted to tie them together under a broader theme, looking at wealth and the American Dream and how the values of consumerism had been exported around the world.”

Due to open a year from now at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, the retrospective will not be a traditional career overview. “I don’t feel that I’m old enough for that kind of exhibition,” Greenfield says. Rather, it will combine photographs, audio interviews and films she has created in a way that explores the themes of wealth and materialism.

In 2012, Greenfield began working the project with Trudy Wilner Stack, a noted curator with whom she had collaborated on several of her projects, including Girl Culture and Thin. “So far we’ve scanned 10,000 pictures from my archives,” Greenfield says. “But to get it down to 10,000, we probably went through a half million images.”

At the same time, Greenfield has been working on new projects that fit into her theme. Last year she traveled to China to shoot a story for GQ called “Bling Dynasty,” looking at how wealth was changing Chinese culture.

“For example,” says Greenfield, “I filmed and photographed a woman who teaches a two-week course on etiquette. For $20,000, people could learn the proper pronunciation of foreign brands. It was like, ‘Repeat after me: Fer-ra-ga-mo.’ They also learned about noble sports like polo and how to eat difficult foods like oysters and caviar.”

Greenfield pitched the idea of the China story to GQ — “I’ve always tried to mix self-generated ideas and magazine assignments,” she says —  but earlier this year it was GQ that came to Greenfield with an idea for story on Magic City, a famous Atlanta strip club where dancers hope to get rich while up-and-coming rap artists hope to get discovered.

“I had stopped working to put together the retrospective, and then GQ called and said ‘strippers’ and ‘make it rain’ and ‘the place where rappers are made,’ and I was thinking, ‘That’s everything I’m talking about in my show,’” she says. “I jumped on a plane and we did it. But we did it in our own way — we brought out a crew and made a film, too.”

Theory of Everything

The film is a good example of Greenfield’s work, which manages to be extraordinarily intimate while investigating bigger themes and ideas. She is a keen and sympathetic observer who allows those ideas to reveal themselves through the vivid characters she captures. “The human-nature part of the story has always been my real interest,” she says.

What made Greenfield’s “Like a Girl" ad so powerful was its strict sense of reality — branded content in the form of a psychological experiment. The film features Greenfield herself, glimpsed briefly and then heard off camera, asking a range of adults to enact what it means to “run like a girl” or “throw like a girl.” Following that, young girls who have not yet been influenced by cultural stereotypes are asked to do the same.

“The ad agency, Leo Burnett, had done research showing that girls’ self-confidence drops at puberty, and that matched up with research I’d done on earlier projects like Girl Culture, Greenfield says. “I was only willing to do the project if we really did the experiment as a real documentary to see what we would get.”

The results are powerful. “I had no idea how deep it would be, because there was an element of fun when people talked about doing things like a girl,” Greenfield says. “But you learn how painful and traumatizing those words have been for people. The viewer has the real-time realization of that, just as the people in the film do.”

Likewise, throughout her entire career, Greenfield has been able to see in real time how small details can be tied together within a larger, meaningful framework. She did so when she photographed teenagers in LA, when she saw the crumbling facade of David and Jackie Siegel’s dream home and when she asked people to demonstrate what it means to act like a girl. In her planned retrospective, she is tying her entire career together in a unified theory of everything, a morality tale for our time.