Fast Forward: Growing up in the Shadow of Hollywood

The boys and girls of Lauren Greenfield's color photographs have smooth, hard, canny faces, and they like to talk. They're unfazed by her camera, which veers expertly from manicured, blue-white Malibu and Beverly Hills to Compton and East L.A., where graffiti crawls over buses and bodies. They describe unique predicaments: 11-year-old Matthew's mother dithers over his pet iguana's $1,200 sonograms and ultrasound; 18-year-old Lindsey's nose job went farther than she'd expected; 8-year-old K.O. raps ''Pimped by the Industry'' in her band, Triple Threat. What these subjects in Fast Forward: Growing up in the Shadow of Hollywood have in common is an ease, an unspecialness, toward the lens pointing straight at them. And that's exactly the framing device of this knowing piece of journalism. Only in L.A., kids, only in L.A. A