Jill Greenberg’s retrospective “Work 2001-2011” will be on display at Fotografiska museum in Sweden from December 13, 2013 – February 9, 2014:

The American artist and photographer Jill Greenberg developed her artistic practice during the infancy of the digital revolution. In 1990, her life as an artist and photographer was radically changed when Photoshop 1.0 was released. The software has given her work and her way of expressing herself with her distinctive hand drawn gesture.

Greenberg has been photographing since she was 9 years old, and since the mid 80s experimented constantly with such disparate techniques as rephotographing slide projections, reflections in mylar, cyanotypes. But ultimately she fell in love with the computer as a tool to create worlds that mirrored the drawing and painting techniques she saw in the Surrealists. This love of pushing the mediums coupled with the rigorous training she received as a young student at Cranbrook, the Detroit Institute of Arts, plus coursework in semiotics and feminist critical theory at Brown University, all inform her work which pokes fun at high and low simultaneously, slyly questioning both art and commerce from both sides of the aisle.

In 1995 she branded her first website the moniker “The Manipulator” after the 80’s German photography magazine as a playful reference to the post-production work was an important part of her creative process. “I like to manipulate my images and retouch them. I don’t usually like straight photography,” she says in an interview. Yet, she has always insisted the source image must be perfectly lit, composed and the expression and mood be present in the original. For her, the post-production adds depth and a painterly look but the image you see is actually quite close to the way it was captured on film.

Fotografiska
Stadsgårdshamnen 22
116 45 Stockholm
SWEDEN

Browse all of Jill Greenberg’s work at ClampArt

Blog post by:
Brian Paul Clamp, Director