Jill Greenberg (b. 1967, Montreal) is an artist and photographer based in New York. She is known for her personal style mastering studio lighting and digital post-production. Her background in painting and illustration, along with an education in art history have deeply marked her work. From an early age, Greenberg has staged photographs and created characters using the mediums of drawing, painting, sculpture, film and photography. As an early adopter of digital technologies, Greenberg has developed a world that is more intense and visceral than the one we live in, creating portraits that seize our attention and tug at our emotions.
Best known for her series End Times, which explores environmental themes exploiting the raw emotion of toddlers unable to use their words, she is also recognised for her portrait work of animals, exploring the trope of studio and celebrity portraiture. Through her work she examines the power dynamics between viewer and subject, humans and animals. Her photographic series were photographed on medium format film, then drum scanned, and finally enhanced with digital ‘hand painting’ techniques. Both of her series, Glass Ceiling and Horse, marked a return to the feminist theory that inspired her graduate thesis, The Female Object while an art student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 80s. As a commercial photographer, she straddles the line between commissioned work and her fine art practice. Her unique gaze as a working female photographer, when directed back at her gallery work, allows a constant interrogation of the image politics and methodologies at work in a culture where pictures have become the de facto universal language.
Greenberg’s work has been presented internationally in galleries and festivals, including ClampArt, New York City, US, 2018; Suwon Photography Festival, Suwon, KR, 2016; Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, Toronto, CA, 2016; Olsen Irwin, Sydney, AU, 2016; Jaski Art Gallery, Amsterdam, NL, 2014; Fotografiska, Stockholm, SE, 2014; Katherine Cone Gallery, Los Angeles, US, 2012; amongst others.
