This poster of “Casey 821,” from Jill Greenberg’s series Horses, shows a standing black horse with a windswept, tousled mane.

Greenberg developed her artistic practice during the infancy of the digital revolution, attached to the computer as a tool for creating worlds that reflect the drawing and painting techniques she found in the Surrealists. In 1990, her life as an artist and photographer radically changed with the release of Photoshop 1.0., and crystallized the quality of digitally rendered hand-drawn painterliness we see in her work today. It is this quality in Greenberg’s photographs that leads them to teeter a line of hyperreality that simultaneously reads as real and artificial.

Obsessed with horses from childhood, Greenberg threads a line of questioning in Horses that is at once psychological and feminist: “What is it that makes young girls project so much onto these gorgeous animals?” The horse has been Greenberg’s primary muse since the early age of six. Now, she returns to this animal as a study of gendered projections — of the way in which we come to gender things—beings—outside of ourselves: the masculinity of the horse’s musculature, the femininity of its tamed frenzy, the overall sexual energy innate to it. Beyond this, Horses ultimately continues Greenberg’s introspection into the emotional and psychological resemblances in the ways we treat people and animals, a thematic fixture across the artist’s work.

“Casey 821” featured in Fotografiska Stockholm’s group exhibition, Like a Horse, in 2014. Comprising some 30 photographers, Like a Horse uses the horse as a common denominator across the exhibition’s artists and works to reflect our relationship with this powerful, spiritual, beautiful, hard-working animal. Curated by Sophie Mörner, this exhibition aims to widen the representation of the horse and its various contexts and cultures, and also inspires a new perspective on the animal and its relationship with humans, and on equine photography as an art form.

Size: 19.69”W x 27.56”H (50x70 cm)

Printed on FSC-certified paper