Girl watching

MEDFORD -- What's happening to girls in America is not news, and it's not pretty. Our image-saturated society teaches girls that their power lies in their looks. Their ability to attract boys and men and their popularity with other girls hinge more on narrow waists, sleek hair, and large breasts than on intelligence, grit, or soul. To be a young, beautiful woman is a powerful thing. What girl has the maturity to handle that power wisely?

Photographer Lauren Greenfield examines all this with anthropological acuity in ''Girl Culture," an exhibition of images of American girls and women paired with text of their own plaintive reflections on life. The show, at the Tufts University Art Gallery, doesn't tell us anything new; any woman who grew up in this country in the last 50 years will recognize herself in these pictures.

Yet Greenfield's response is new. As a photographer, she fights fire with fire, glossy color photo with glossy color photo. She holds up her own pictures as a mirror to show us, with appalling clarity, how distorted and wounding our obsession with self-image has become. She ably demonstrates that girl culture has gone from sugar, spice, and everything nice (at least by reputation) to something so toxic it kills.

Maybe it all goes back to Eve and that apple of feminine sexuality. It's so charged with meaning, so potent to both men and women, that girls either grab wildly for it or push it away. Look at the photo of Erin, 24, an anorexic who stands on a scale with her back to the balance, so she won't see her weight. She's a wraith, robbed of so much potential -- not just sexually, but as a person -- because she doesn't want to engage in that power exchange. Greenfield quotes her: ''When I was 12, I started developing, and I was just horrified. No one ever taught me how to deal with the attention I would get with that body, so when I started getting it, it scared me. I would tape my breasts and the inside of my thighs, because I wanted to keep the boyish, pre-adolescent figure."

Everyone in these photos grapples with that metaphorical apple, and its attendant loss of innocence. Greenfield photographed girls at a ''fat camp" in the Cat-skills; even there, the thinnest garner the most attention and graduate to popularity. She visited several rituals of female adolescence -- the prom, the quinceañera (a ''sweet 15" ritual in the Hispanic community). She went shopping, she went to Florida for spring break. She went to May Day at a girls' prep school in Tennessee, where she met 18-year-old Mary Cady, who will ''be a virgin until I'm married. No ifs, ands, or buts."

Cady pretty much sums up the hierarchy of teenage girls: ''I would rather be dumb than be a slut, but I would rather be a slut than be fat or ugly."

If the words are chilling, the photographs are horrifying: Portraits of mournful pudgy teens contrast with group shots of popular girls, like those in Edina, Minn., who all have a superior, withering expression that could make a five-star general want to scurry away with his tail between his legs. They're horrifying, yet beautiful; Greenfield shows us the inherent, yearning vulnerability in all these girls and women, even as they steel it over with highlights, tiaras, and thongs. It's strange -- the more they take off, as in the spring break shots, the more they seem hidden, or in retreat from themselves.

Two video projections by Alex McQuilkin make a nice pairing with Greenfield's show. In ''Get Your Gun Up," McQuilkin quotes spaghetti westerns, in particular Sergio Leone's ''The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." The scene is classic: gunslingers fingering the weapons in their holsters. Only here, the gunslingers are bikini-clad models, and instead of guns, they finger the strings along the hip of their bikini bottoms. McQuilkin cleverly equates the threat and power of a young woman's sexuality with that of a gun.

Her second video, ''Teenage Daydreams: In Vain," is less succinct and more melodramatic. A girl with bloodied wrists applies makeup to her face; like Greenfield's subjects, she strives for beauty as a salve and cover-up. But this iconic, wounded girl makes that point laborious, while Greenfield's photos are more nuanced and open-ended.

In the end, Eve's apple represents knowledge; let's call it self-knowledge. And while these girls often wear a mask of premature world-weariness, in fact they're deploying parts of themselves they know little about.

Another show at Tufts, ''Time Signatures," is an eloquent antidote to Greenfield's show and McQuilkin's videos. Barbara Zucker has traced the crows' feet on the faces of older women and parlayed these gestures into art.

Zucker amplifies the wrinkles a thousand fold; they sprawl over the walls in skittery curves, like flocks of birds just taking off. One rises from a puddle on the floor straight up, a series of tumbling arcs; it looks rather like a dancer. The least effective piece is the largest, ''Lillian's Face Flowing," which rushes like a waterfall of black rubber from a balcony on an upper floor down to the next; unfortunately, in the thicket of rubber, Zucker loses the lovely, crumpling individual lines that really give this body of work personality.

Even so, it's a relief to imagine all that wrinkles have to offer. The women in Greenfield's photos would no doubt be hitting the Botox before they let Zucker anywhere near them. But Zucker reminds us what a relief it is to relax and be ourselves, wrinkles, puckers, cellulite, and all. That's where true beauty lies.

Lauren Greenfield: Girl Culture
Alex McQuilkin: Get Your Gun Up
Teenage Daydream: In Vain
Barbara Zucker: Time Signatures
At: Tufts University Art Gallery, Aidekman Arts Center, 40R Talbot Ave., Medford, through March 27. 617-627- 3518. www.tufts.edu/as/gallery