I’m fairly conflicted as to how I feel about the high-gloss painterly/photographic work of Jill Greenberg; I can’t quite put my finger on why.
Her series-turned-bestseller Monkey Portraits is what first put her on my radar (and I assume put her in many a spotlight). My overall reaction was one of skepticism and general distaste — there was something just awfully cutesy and gift-book/stocking-stuffer about those funny-looking monkeys, even if there was something rather evocative in an individual image. The technique is quite proficient, that is difficult to argue. And Greenberg’s story as to where these pictures started — a chance photo of a monkey that was part of a commercial shoot, isolated on the white backdrop– is rather interesting. She thought to herself, “Oh, this looks like something I’ve never seen before—a studio portrait of a monkey.”
That said, I think I was particularly frustrated when I discovered how little the nature and technique differs when she’s shooting magazine ads and celebrity portraits. Her commercial work is viewable on her website, the wincing-ly and self-seriously branded manipulator.com (each page boasts, Jill Greenberg: The Manipulator). (Okay, I suppose I should note that I’m aware I write this commentary on a website called [Good Eye, Meriwether .com], and suspect that the dryness and humble self-doubt that I intend to be intoned along with the self-congratulatory nature of the literal website address is lost on most.) There is an indistinguishable glossiness throughout… no clear differentiation of intent. Her glowing air-brushing-in-the-21st-century trademark is very cool, appropriate for selling magazines, but if the intent is to just make cool pictures, of celebs and (sure, why not?) monkeys too, I’m not sure why I should care after three or four.
So why do I love her bear portraits so?
The series is called Ursine, and I’m not sure — am I just impressed with myself that I know what “ursine” means? Like Monkey Portraits, I suppose many of these could appear on a cute dorm room poster, but I still feel there’s a tone of seriousness here which I can’t be bothered to seek out in the monkey pics. That the bears are fairly nondescript and monochromatic, I’d argue that there’s more of a need to look a little closer. The level of detail in Greenberg’s images is quite revealing. And as she implies in the following interview excerpt, there are mixed responses to the character of bears: cuddly, grizzly, teddy, deadly, and so on.
“What’s interesting about the bears is that they’re trained to stand up and growl and look really scary and menacing, but when they’re doing it they’re totally silent. They’re just silently acting like scary grizzly bears. When I was shooting the bears, I was surprised that they’d often pose like cuddly teddy bears. I thought that was really cute and I liked the dichotomy between the two ways the bears could be. Their faces are so mushy. They can look like a growling bear at one moment and then a cuddly bear a moment later.” Excerpt from The Morning News; Interview by Rosecrans Baldwin.