Photographer Spotlight – Jill Greenberg

Here at OSP Towers we have been great fans of Jill Greenberg for some time and have featured her work before but this in depth article with great pictures on Faded+Blurred caught our attention and we just had to share.

Social and political commentary has long been reserved for artists and musicians, rather than fine art photographers. Aside from photojournalists, perhaps, whose whose very work exists as commentary, of sorts, fine art photographers, by and large, shoot solely for art’s sake, not necessarily to make a statement on society. Photographer Jill Greenberg, however, seems to be an exception to this and is known in many circles for the controversy surrounding her photography as much as her photography itself. Indeed, she seems to be almost comfortable when heated discourse accompanies her work. She calls herself “Manipulator”, a nickname taken from an 80′s German culture magazine of the same name. It’s a fitting moniker, since she has been manipulating her images using Photoshop since1990. Then there are the messages, the meanings, the underlying ideologies behind her photographs. She has strong opinions and chooses to use her art as a means of political expression as well as a creative endeavor…..I saw Jill Greenberg’s work for the first time a few years ago, shortly after her “End Times” series came out. This series became the first of several controversies of which both she and her work were the center. I remember looking at some of the photos and wondering how she got those kids to cry with such intensity. I couldn’t imagine that it would have been done on purpose, that anyone would purposely make kids cry like that for a photograph. I was wrong. She got the idea from a previous shoot she did involving children. One of the kids became hysterically upset. She said it reminded her of the helplessness and anger she felt with the Bush administration. She decided she wanted to do something with those feelings, with that intensity. Like any artist, she wanted to be able to express her outrage through her work.  READ MORE HERE

 

See the full article here and here is a link to Jill’s site