Ape expressions

It is all about the glow. A Jill Greenberg portrait — whether of Lindsay Lohan or a lemur, Moby or a meerkat — shines.

Greenberg's photos look dewy, almost metallic. A layperson might think she dunks people in a vat of Victoria's Secret body shimmer.

But Greenberg achieves her signature style through lighting and digital touch-ups. (Greenberg's website is “Manipulator'', a wink at her reputation as Photoshop queen.)

“A lot of people use the word hyper-real,'' she says. “They're portraits and they're personal but there's a little twist going on. An edge.''

Greenberg, 40, shoots celebrity portraits (Clint Eastwood, Gwen Stefani, Jon Stewart among others) and has expanded her client list to all kinds of mammals, becoming one of the entertainment industry's go-to animal photographers.

She is shooting a new marketing campaign for Animal Planet and her lamb photo is in February GQ.

Eleven large-scale works from her book Monkey Portraits are on view at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), her first solo show in Washington DC.

Next up? A book of bear photos.

Her main manipulation of the monkey and ape portraits is in the eyes: She whitens the whites and enhances the colours of the irises.

She recalls how a capuchin named Chitta acted “skittish and crazy'' during her shoot, which soon became more a game of chase than a photo sitting.

Eventually, Greenberg snapped Chitta's picture while the monkey was hanging upside down from her trainer's arm.

]In the post-Photoshop image, The Hatchling, Chitta is right side up and her trainer's arm is not in the frame.

“The pictures are pretty straight,'' she says. “It's not like I've changed anything to make it not true.''

J.D. Talasek, director of cultural programmes at NAS, first saw Greenberg's monkey portraits, which are about four feet square, at the New York gallery ClampArt.

He was drawn to the photos' anthropomorphic quality. The titles — Regal, Anxious and Haughty — emphasise the humanness of the images.

In Mala Centrefold, a baboon lies on her side in a Playboy-ready pose that she learnt from her trainer.

Greenberg's animal work shows “how we're programmed in our minds to look at certain gestures, expressions and postures and how we project our own feelings onto that'', Talasek says.

Of the 30 or so primate portrait sittings, the more intelligent chimpanzees and orangutans make faces at her, though she edited out the “cheesy chimp faces'' because they are too expected, she says.

Though Greenberg says she didn't go into the monkey shoots with any preconceived ideas, that wasn't the case with a 2006 series called End Times, of 2- and 3-year-old children crying.

One of the photos, which she took right after President Bush's re-election, is titled Four More Years, to suggest that the child is pained over politics.

The series title, End Times, is also a political statement.

“Jill Greenberg: Monkey Portraits'' at the National Academy of Sciences will be on till April 1. Be prepared to
present a photo ID.