Jill Greenberg writes:
“The new work is in charcoal, pastel, and oil. It marks a return to the earliest part of my practice, as far back as I can remember—drawing. I would invent characters, shapes. I was a girl alone in my room. I drew for hours.
“That impulse—to make something from absolutely nothing—returned to me a few years ago when I took a step back from photography.
“These new works begin with automatic drawing—subconscious image-making, a game I used to play with my father. He would draw a line, and I would turn it into something. That spirit animates the work. Total free association. The engine is play. Drawing allows me to work fast and stay loose. Charcoal and oil are tactile and immediate. The doodles, the first marks, are the most honest—recordings of time and thought before polish sets in. The challenge is preserving that energy in a more finished piece.
“My entire body of photography has likely been uploaded and consumed by generative artificial intelligence. (Every time you see a bit of gloss or glow around a subject, it’s possible one of my monkeys or crying children influenced that.) There’s this certain expectation to respond to that. And I don’t really want to. These drawings have no prompt. They are a null response to AI. Just a line, a smudge, a gesture. Memory, instinct, play. Someday an algorithm will mimic this, too.”