Jill Greenberg
was born in July of 1967 in Montreal, Canada, and grew up in suburban
Detroit. She graduated in 1989 form the Rhode Island School of Design
with a BFA in Photography and moved to New York City to pursue a career
in photography. Jill was based in New York until 2001, and now resides
in Los Angeles.
For the series “Monkey Portraits”, Greenberg has created a series of
monkey portraits and asks us to consider, in another way, where we are
coming from. We look into her monkey’s expressions, their faces — their
peculiar physiognomy — and somehow see ourselves. It is frightening
and disorienting and exhilarating and awesome. She mischievously shows
us another type of mirror-stage, where we confront an ancient and
distorted reflection, another startling spectacle, and try to make sense
of who, or what we are seeing. By intentionally anthropomorphizing her
monkeys, we can’t help but identify with their gaze, and be reminded of
people we know, expressions that we have seen before.
An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men. Charles Darwin
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