Photographer goes deep into Hollywood jungle
It's all about the glow. A Jill Greenberg portrait — whether it's of Lindsay Lohan or a lemur, Moby or a meerkat — shines.
Greenberg's photos look dewy, almost metallic. A layperson might think she dunks people in a vat of Victoria's Secret body shimmer. But Greenberg achieves her signature style through lighting and digital touch-ups. (The name of Greenberg's Web site is "Manipulator," a wink at her reputation as the Photoshop queen.)
"A lot of people use the word hyper-real," she says on the phone from her Los Angeles photography studio. "They're portraits and they're personal but there's a little twist going on. An edge."
Greenberg, 40, shoots celebrity portraits (Clint Eastwood, Gwen Stefani, Jon Stewart among others) and has expanded her client list to all kinds of mammals, becoming one of the entertainment industry's go-to animal photographers.
She is shooting a new marketing campaign for Animal Planet and her lamb photo is in February GQ. Eleven large-scale works from her book "Monkey Portraits" are on view at the National Academy of Sciences, her first solo show in Washington, D.C. Next up? A book of bear photos.
Her main manipulation of the monkey and ape portraits is in the eyes: She whitens the whites and enhances the colors of the irises. She recalls how a white-faced baby capuchin named Chitta acted "skittish and crazy" during her shoot, which soon became more a game of chase than a photo sitting.
Eventually, Greenberg snapped Chitta's picture while the monkey was hanging upside down from her trainer's arm. In the post-Photoshop image, "The Hatchling," Chitta is right side up and her trainer's arm is not in the frame.
"The pictures are pretty straight," she says. "It's not like I've changed anything to make it not true. So they can stand up. Any primatologist would look at that and not think, 'What did you do to that face?' "
J.D. Talasek, director of cultural programs at NAS, first saw Greenberg's monkey portraits, which are about 4 feet square, at the New York gallery ClampArt.
Talasek was drawn to the artistically enhanced photos' anthropomorphic quality. The titles of the photographs — such as "Regal," "Anxious" and "Haughty" — emphasize the humanness of the images. In "Mala Centerfold," a baboon lies on her side in a Playboy-ready pose that she learned from her trainer.
He says Greenberg's animal work shows "how we're programmed in our minds to look at certain gestures, expressions and postures and how we project our own feelings onto that," Talasek says. "It's happening in our own mind."
In fact, when you look at Greenberg's body of work, it's easy to see the parallels between certain human and animal photos; her portaits can make for intriguing diptychs.
Of the 30 or so primate portrait sittings, the larger, more intelligent animals such as chimpanzees and orangutans make faces at her, though she was careful to edit out the "cheesy chimp faces" because they are too expected, she says.
Though Greenberg says she didn't go into the monkey shoots with any preconceived ideas of what emotions she wanted from her simian subjects, that wasn't the case with a 2006 series called "End Times," of 2- and 3-year-old children crying.
Most of them were showbiz kids accompanied by their parents, who knew that their children were going to be crying for the 15-minute sitting. Greenberg got them to bawl by having her assistant or the children's parents give them lollipops and then snatch them away.
One of the photos, which she took right after President Bush's reelection, is titled "Four More Years," to suggest that the child is pained over politics. The series title, "End Times," is also intended as a political statement.
See more of Jill Greenberg's work in a photo gallery at washingtonpost.com/museums.