Do you remember those beautiful pictures of crying children presented during Paris Photo or FIAC Show-Off 2009? Moving, disturbing, these photos of innocent children that we want to take in our arms to ease their pain.
This emotion is offered to us by Jill Greenberg from January 15 to March 27, 2010 at the Acte2 Gallery. This American photographer has been shooting portraits of celebrities for the last fifteen years as well as some advertising photographs. His style is unique, realistic and strong, with a mastery of light and a constant attention to detail. From these years, a nickname has remained: The Manipulator.
His exhibition at the Acte2 gallery is an opportunity to present a double work around the same theme, the portrait: End Times and Portraits of Monkeys.
End Times or “The innocent weeps for the world we are about to leave him”. These portraits of children expressing different degrees of suffering and frustration go beyond simple photos. And this not only because of the political message they contain, but also because of the controversy they caused when they were published among some prudish parents. Indeed, some people were offended that the photographer made children cry to make her pictures and spoke of “Child Abuse”. Each of his children represents a concept that mourns the state in which our generation leaves it to others: truth, earth… Jill greenberg is a committed photographer who does not hesitate to use shocking images to raise awareness.
Through the second part of her exhibition, the photographer forces us to look at ourselves through our distant cousins, despite the creationists of all kinds. The similarities between apes and us have never been more forcefully and humorously revealed than in these portraits. “Deputy”, “Misanthrope”, “Joker”, “Guilty”, “Chatty”, “Pontificating”, “Stupefied”, “Persecuted”, “Uppity”, “Pote”: beyond the obvious and hilarious anthropomorphism, the characters and emotions that emerge from these intimate portraits are disturbing because they are a caricatured mirror of ourselves, without our veneer of “civilized beings”.
The author has photographed more than thirty monkeys of about twenty species: marmosets, mandrills, capuchins, macaques, orangutans, chimpanzees. These photos are both funny and sad, they are sublime in all simplicity.
I invite you to run and see this variation on the portrait, especially since the photographer does not exhibit much in Paris and in France in general.
Marie-Odile Radom
Act2 Gallery
41 rue d’Artois
75008 Paris
00 33 (0) 1 42 89 50 05
www.acte2photo.com
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