Jill Greenberg: The Glass Ceiling

Jill Greenberg is known for her wide variety of work as a commercial photographer, Artist, Celebrity photographer, Conceptual photography and much much more. In this series titles The Glass Ceiling she is capturing how the “process” is of being a woman. These women are professional athletes and dancers dressed up for work. This series was inspired by a commercial photo shoot she was commissioned to do for the olympic swimming team. She then decided to hire a local swim team and instructed them with the gestures she wanted to capture as she was at the bottom of the pool in full scuba gear as well as an 65 megapixel back on her digital camera. The water would work against these athletes as they attempted to pose which would push them into awkward positions, all while they are wearing heals which gives them even less control under the water and emphasizes their lack of control in this world. The quote by Sandra Lee Bartky, “The disciplinary project of femininity is a setup, it requires such radical and extensive bodily transformation, that a woman is destined in some degree to fail.” was a key influence for Greenberg in this Series.

The idea of the “Female Object”as it is directly channeled from the male psych is an ideal behind this. The sexualized bodies become the focus of her images because the heads are cut off, leaving their identities unknown and irrelevant. She states that “The images channel the feelings I have of being powerless in a culture run by men. The psychic violence is made pictorially overt. The subjects are victimized despite their physical strength, health and any other good luck they might have been born into. The fact that they had the bad luck of being born women makes them a punchline.” It is made obvious that the male culture feels aggressively dismissive towards women with the amount of violence in todays slang when discussing women or sexual intercourse. She finds it important to show the violence and emotions she feels as a woman living in a contemporary culture. They are meant to feel like they are violent towards women, because she wants to evoke what it feels like to exist in the female body.