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Jill Greenberg
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Expressive Horses
Former Detroiter coaxes intimate portraits
from her four-legged subjects.
Louis Finkelman
Special to the Jewish News
I
n the last of his celebrated travels,
Lemuel Gulliver comes to a land ruled
by thoughtful, intelligent, civilized,
humane horses, the Houyhhnhnms.
That same land has an infestation of
vile, lustful, brutish, squalid, argumenta-
tive and stupid humanoids, the Yahoos.
Gulliver tries, unsuccessfully, to convince
his patient Houyhhnhnm master that
the civilized humans of Europe are not
Yahoos; ultimately, Gulliver himself comes
to believe that humans are indeed just
Yahoos, and only horses are civilized.
We have all seen brutish human beings,
but where can you find philosophical, wise
horses?
On the pages of photographer Jill
Greenberg's new book, Horses (Rizzoli,
New York), these photographs show what
you would expect to see: rippling muscles
of huge athletic beasts. They also show
the unexpected: wisdom, resignation, sad-
ness, melancholy and thoughtfulness in
the facial expression of a horse. Who knew
that horses have facial expressions at all?
"All animals make subtle expressions:'
says Greenberg, 45, who grew up in West
Bloomfield, graduated from the Rhode
Island School of Design and is an award-
winning commercial and fine art photog-
rapher now living in New York with her
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April 25 • 2013
husband and two children. "You just have
to look carefully. You can tell the mood of
anyone, animals included, by their body
language:'
In this book, though, the horses reveal
more than body language; they also have
noble, expressive faces.
Intimate Portraits
Many photographers show horses against
the expected background of lush land-
scapes of hills and prairies, and so does
Greenberg. Improbably enough, she also
has taken studio portraits of horses. The
horses, great, powerful and skittish ani-
mals, do not come into the photographer's
studio to pose, so she makes part of the
horse's habitat into a studio, and takes inti-
mate portraits of the animals there.
To get horses against a plain white
background, Greenberg uses, not digital
manipulation, but the white walls of an
indoor exercise area. She says that she
"strips the subjects out of their natural
environment so that one can observe their
form in a more graphic presentation:'
Instead of using a convenient little
camera made for action photography, she
uses an oversize portrait camera, which
she wrestles to point at the animals as they
move.
You can see this process on the Internet
in a video of Greenberg taking photo-
graphs for this book, circling the corral,
aiming her huge camera at a horse, while
a trainer directs the horse back and forth.
The horse never looks ungraceful. The
photographer struggles.
Greenberg says that, as she worked,
she felt more danger from horses than
she ever did from her earlier work pho-
tographing bears.
"Horses were the most dangerous
animal I have shot; they are prey ani-
mals so they think at any moment I
might jump and kill them. Predators
can understand when you are mellow
with them, so despite a polar bear's
enormous power and the fact that they
are meat eaters, it ultimately was a more
safe feeling than shooting a skittish
powerful beast like the horse."
The bear, Greenberg notes, feels confi-
dent that it can kill you. The horse always
feels frightened. That makes the horse
less predictable — and more dangerous.
Love For Horses
As a child in West Bloomfield, Greenberg
had a family pet, a dog named Plato. She
enjoyed trying to photograph Plato when
he looked, as his name implied he would,
philosophical.
Her parents, Charles and Carolyn
Greenberg of Bloomfield Township, recall
that when she was little, she already had
an appreciation for horses. If the family
drove past a working horse, she would
ask, "Why does that poor horse have to
work so hard?" She would insist that the
family stop to buy an apple for her to give
to the horse.
Now, as an adult, Jill Greenberg takes
photographs that demonstrate her iden-
tification with horses. She continues to
explore how people in power treat both
horses and humans. Horses of both sexes
strike humans as dominating and mascu-
line in exciting ways.
Greenberg describes horses as "sexy
beasts:' And yet horses in some ways seem
powerless, like exploited humans — "usu-
ally women" — and are "traded as chattel:'
The instruments humans use to control
horses are, literally, "bondage gear:'
Yet Greenberg intends the images in
Horses not primarily to convey a mes-
sage, but to convey beauty. Greenberg has
faithfully caught these naturally gorgeous
animals in sharp focus. She has digitally
painted additional color on some of the
photographs, just "because I can:' but
clearly in ways that call attention to the
animals' esthetic appeal.
Anyone who leafs through this book
will not soon forget the tender double
portraits of a mare and her foal, the vivid
stop-action of a rearing black stallion,
the close-up of a horse's face in sorrowful
meditation. Anyone who sees these pho-
tographs will want to treat the next horse
as a noble Houyhhnhnm.
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