PRODUCT PLACEMENT - The Photobooth that is Jill Greenberg

My two favorite axioms from art school are: 1. Photographs don’t lie, but photographers do. 2. If you can’t make it good, make it big; if you can’t make it big, then make it shiny. Jill Greenberg’s work is all lies and glisten, but in her case it’s mostly a good thing.

While primarily known as a commercial photographer, Greenberg has been making several in-roads into the world of fine art photography in recent years. Her signature style of hyper-perfect detail, blown out highlights, and top-notch photoshop skills has graced the covers of VIBE, TIME, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, WIRED and a host of other magazines. She has been honing her "digital dieting" skills for many years and some of her imagery slips easily into the white wall world. Her meticulousness polished in the commercial world serves her well in the fine art realm. Greenberg’s prints are painstakingly created and the photographs themselves are nuanced almost to a fault. As a photographer, what I find most intriguing about her images is that they are all essentially the same. The subject changes of course, but the lighting, background and exposure are all mechanically exact. Which renders her subjects (people, monkeys or bears) as nothing more than products. While photographers like David LaChapelle or Gregory Crewdson stage elaborate scenes or tableaus for their images, Greenberg relies on gestures, titles and her expertise as a manipulator to coax the viewer into her realm.

A recent pairing of her series Ursine and End Times at ClampArt in NYC is a prime example of how Greenberg’s homogenizing techniques work.

For the now infamous End Times series, Greenberg photographed dozens of crying babies and used them as stand-ins for her view of the current political landscape here in the United States. Her views are not at all rosy. Each image is linked with titles like, “Grand Old Party,” “Four More Years,” “The Truth,” “Deniability.” Each title refers to the George W. Bush administration and its impact on our world and the future world of the children depicted. The series caused quite an uproar when it was first exhibited last year and remains high on the list of what’s wrong with art in the blogosphere. I won’t talk about issues of child exploitation, psychological projection or abuse here (there is more than enough of that already about these images), rather I’d like to focus on whether or not these images work as photographs and commentary. There were six images on view each was 50” x 43” so every pore, tear drop and mucus flow was terribly enhanced. The proportions and scale of the heads in the frames is are almost hieratic in style and the series‘s reference to politics could reference ancient Rome, but I doubt that Greenberg was considering this when making the work. Her primary conceit that the images are a reaction to the re-election of George W. Bush fails for me because of the simple fact that without the titles the images are unbranded and become well photographed pictures of crying babies. I will say this about the babies, they were all (except for Greenberg’s daughter) professional actors. Each with managers and agents; that’s end times for you.

Speaking of professionals, the bears in Ursine were also professionals, each working for food. For these images, Greenberg headed to Canada to photographs bears of all kinds (Grizzly, Black, Polar, etc). The photographs were made outdoors (Greenberg brought her Photobooth outside). The resulting images are gorgeous. Seeing every hair here works; the bears run the gamut of emotions- as if they were acting... well okay, they were acting. There is joy, pathos, anger, ferocity and shame. All served through gestures and careful manipulations of the bears by their handlers and of course further manipulations by Greenberg and here Wacom tablet. I found Ursine more engaging and intriguing than End Times. The bears’ movements and actions are universally understood and required no footnote (the photos of the bears are all untitled). When viewing the groups side by side one could easily transpose the titles from End Times to the photos in End Times and the resulting images would be as powerful.

Greenberg’ latest offering is Performance, photographs of young girls (one her daughter and one another pro) hanging from harnesses. Says Greenberg, ”This work is an exploration of ‘Performance’ in all its meanings; the child performer, or the child performing in school; in real-world achievements; rating their beauty and behavior as well as the act of being a girl where femininity is often a performance. These photographs are also about the frisson between the innocence of little girls and the rigging and gesture of their bodies. These gestures may appear forced or mannered but they are natural and athletic. Both of these little girls—one my daughter and the other a working child model/actress—have been performing since they could smile. They are self-conscious of their body and beauty, yet their performance is rigged.” Sally Mann, watch out.

SB

Philip-Lorca diCorcia in situ

Philip-Lorca di Corcia learned early on as a student at The Museum School in Boston, a "fundamental anti-romantic lesson that meaning in photography derives as much from concept and culture as from serendipitous inspiration." (Bennett Simpson, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston) He later studied at Yale where Walker Evans, the great documentary/fine art photographer taught for decades. Both schools influenced diCorcia’s future work and ideas profoundly. diCorcia’s photographs cut across various styles of photography including staged, conceptual and documentary.

Early work was almost completely staged using family and friends as models, later moving on to, hustlers, prostitutes and nude dancers. In diCorcia’s street photography, however, documentary and staged processes are blended to create his own definitive results. In the series “Streetwork” for example, he uses the actual street scene as a stage set for his event to unfold [some images here]. Hidden strobes set to sync with his medium format camera, many feet away, are used to create the distinctive lighting. He arranged as much as he could and then waited for the moment when his subject would step across this landscape.

Photographing people on the street is nothing new and the masters are numerous. What diCorcia shares with well-known street photographers like Henri Cartier Bresson or Gary Winogrand are glimpses of unsuspecting humans found on the streets. DiCorcia’s "chosen moments", however couldn’t feel further away from the spontaneity of Bresson or even the “Uneasy Streets” of Winogrand. It’s distinct from these artists’ works because of the added artificial lighting and lack of spontaneity that’s felt in the image, reinforcing his peculiar style and content. Winogrand’s “Uneasy Streets” for example, are sprinkled with subtle mockery and humor, while Bresson ties into representing human emotional ranges in identifiable clips. What diCorcia’s work presents for us in this series are glimpses of the modern man’s dilemma -ennui, struggle, fear, blankness and the feeling of a frozen moment, the moment between the moments. In a way, his work is more reminiscent of Lee Friedlander’s reflections of himself in mirrors on the streets of New Orleans- partly staged and ambivalent in emotion.

“Heads” is another intriguing series of photographs by diCorcia, of people traveling through the city (completely unaware of being photographed) with just their heads and shoulders captured against a blackened background where the light falls off. Their expressions are usually dull, troubled (with the occasional positive thought). What is fascinating is the randomness of the heads and the privacy of their moment as diCorcia steals the image so successfully. The dramatic lighting makes each individual glow in what seems an omniscient moment. The lighting in this series is comparable to the Renaissance painter Caravaggio. The randomness of his subjects also recalls the film work of Andy Warhol who shot hours of unedited film of people walking on the sidewalks of NYC, challenging the viewer to perceive something of interest in the mundane. By contrast, diCorcia, who shot thousands of photographs for this series, consequently edited them down to 16 final prints.
Of the multitude of artists that do use the public sphere to pull from, diCorcia stands out even more substantively with his unusual point of view and obvious influence on those who follow. Through his work, we find representations of modern human’s banal existence revealed through a non-judgmental lens under perfect lighting and masterful compositions.

MV