Commercial vs. Artistic: Can Jill Greenberg Have it Both Ways?
I just got back from a weekend out of town, and finished a large stack of work, so I’m not sure if I’m way behind on this web-controversy or not. I’m not even sure if this is a controversy or if it seems that way because I read some photography blogs and all of the Atlantic bloggers are in my RSS reader. But anyway here are some thoughts on Jill Greenburg’s photographs of John McCain.
Greenberg, of course, with a website called “The Manipulator” photographed John McCain for the recent cover story in The Atlantic. After finishing the frames for the cover shoot she asked the candidate to walk over to another side of the room where she pretended a beauty dish was lighting him, when the actual effect came from the ground. “He had no idea he was being lit from below,” she told the New York Post. Nor did his handlers, “I guess they’re not very sophisticated.” Later, Greenberg photoshoped these images and posted them on her blog. Most iconic: he appears sinister with bloody vampire fangs and the words, “I Am a Bloodthirsty Warmongerer.”
Jeffrey Goldberg is especially bothered as the controversy over these images undermines the cover story he penned, “The Wars of John McCain” which is well worth reading. (“John McCain believes the Vietnam War was winnable. Now he argues that an Obama administration would accept defeat in Iraq, with grave costs to American honor and national security. Is McCain’s quest for victory a reflection of an antiquated pre-Vietnam mind-set? Or of a commitment to principles we abandon at our peril? Is there any war McCain thinks can’t be won?”) From his blog:
I don’t know Greenberg (I count this as a blessing) and I can add nothing to what James Bennet told the Post except to say that Greenberg is quite obviously an indecent person who should not be working in magazine journalism. Every so often, journalists become deranged at the sight of certain candidates, and lose their bearings. Why, this has even happened in the case of John McCain once or twice. What I find truly astonishing is the blithe way in which she has tried to hurt this magazine.
The Atlantic says in an “Editor’s Note”, she “disgraced herself, and we are appalled by the manipulated images she has created for her Web site of John McCain.” Editor James Bennet wrote McCain an apology and is considering a lawsuit, (“She has violated the terms of our agreement with her, of our contract with her so we’re taking steps. So we’re looking into what steps we can see to do something about that.”) Greenberg, for her part, is hardly apologetic, and still has a photograph of McCain with a shadow on his face reading, “mccain voted against mlk day” on the front page of her website or something similar (it changes to another altered image if you refresh.)
Conservatives like Michelle Malkin are disgusted Greenberg was hired in the first place. In 2006, she exhibited a collection of photographs of crying children with political titles like “Grand Old Party” and “Four More Years”. She gave children candy and snatched it away while snapping an image. Thomas Hawk, who is better known for blogging about museums that forbid indoor photography, wrote she is a “Sick Woman Who Should Be Arrested and Charged With Child Abuse” back in 2006, as many leftie, pro-first amendment, tech-savvy people agreed. Here’s another post on Thinking Pictures explaining why this is different than debates surrounding Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe.
That summer Greenberg was interviewed in PopPhoto:
Your images have certainly caused an uproar. What do you say to people who call you a child abuser?
I think they’re insane. I know the comment you’re talking about. I don’t know what the guy’s personal problems are. I don’t think he’s got kids. I have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and she cries for no reason, a hundred times a day. It’s normal. Maybe getting kids to cry isn’t the nicest thing to do, but I’m not causing anyone permanent psychological damage.
I side with Jim Lewis’ assessment of her work in his otherwise meandering article for Slate:
This is the sort of art that makes one groan and roll one’s eyes. It’s political in the worst way: literal-minded, preachy as a bumper sticker, and, well, infantile. Moreover, the pictures themselves don’t look very interesting (for one thing, Greenberg seems to think that size—the photos are 42 inches by 50 inches—is a substitute for power). But lots of people make bad art without inspiring the kind of fury that Greenberg drew down upon herself. Her mistake was not in her meaning, but in her method….To provoke tears in order to take a picture is objectionable, and worthy of some condemnation. But it’s not as if she beat them with a belt because she wanted to photograph their bruises. On this front, it seems to me, Greenberg was wrong, and Hawk overreacted, and there isn’t much more to be said.
While she’s not much of an artist, she is a talented magazine photographer with a comical David Lachapelle-inspired point of view. Looking at the McCain images on Sunday, I forgot about the photos of the crying kids, but remembered her very clever portraits of Arnold Schwarzenegger for Wired. She nailed an 80s-nostalgic, harsh focus but idealistic, almost Sears Portrait-inspired look.
The other part of the controversy seems to be the way she staged the photo shoot after she finished with the frames for The Atlantic. While, everyone knows she could make him look like that with photoshop, it’s the authenticity of the image that is freaking people out.
When people who like you take candid pictures of you they tend to be good pictures. Not just because you are relaxed around them and likely don’t need to fake a smile. He or she will tell you to step out of the glare, or delete the picture where you look like you’re sneezing. Not so, with someone you barely know or don’t like. Photography is very much an art of editing. Witness the kind of candid shots cropped in negative ads to make the opposition look unsavory.
But a commercial photographer is no different than a graphic designer or architect in that he or she is working creatively for someone else’s interests. In the end, the photobloggers aren’t really siding with Michelle Malkin. They see it as less in terms of disrespect to McCain, than unprofessional conduct with a client that reflects poorly on their trade.
The best posts on Greenberg come from Mark Tucker with a list of ten things learned from the controversy, “First off, decide who you are. Are you an artist, or are you a commercial photographer? You need to know, because The Rules are really different…On a commission job, don’t screw the Subject, unless the Client is in on it. If it’s an Attack Piece, that’s fine, no problem. But make sure the magazine is in on it. When you’re working for a commission, I just can’t justify going off like that, and I’m talking about that awful bottom lit portrait; not even the horrid stuff that she did later, in Photoshop. McCain showed up, he stayed his alloted time, and he thought he wouldn’t be screwed.”
That she took photographs for her own use seems customary for a freelance photographer (“editorial rates are so lousy that if a photographer does NOT make her own image to get something more out of any project, that is just bad business,” writes one defense of Greenberg.) The photoshopping, isn’t really without precedent either, as many other blogs point to Arnold Newman’s portrait of Alfried Krupp. Jorg Colberg counters, “First, comparing Arnold Newman with a photographer who made a career out of taking heavily Photoshopped portraits of monkeys… I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel right… Second, Alfried Krupp was a convicted war criminal. In contrast, John McCain is his party’s candidate for the presidency. He’s not a war criminal. And whatever you might think of his positions (his support for the Iraq War, for example), that sets him very much apart from Alfried Krupp.”
Another Tucker post says, “If Greenberg was so intent on making a political statement, why did she speak to the press about this, which to me, dilutes her photographs, and puts the focus on her personally?” Tony Novak-Clifford agrees:
Unfortunately, Ms. Greenberg seems to have forgotten the old cliche “a picture is worth a thousand words”. In the public prints, no less, Jill denigrates McCain’s handlers as “unsophisticated”, her client at The Atlantic as “irresponsible” for hiring her based on her previous body of work. She then goes as far as to post manipulated images from the shoot on her website (since deleted as I understand) picturing the senator with bloody shark’s teeth and another picturing a chimpanzee defecating on his head.
We may have finally reached a time when the old maxim “there’s no such thing as bad publicity…” no longer rings true. The ultimate fallout over Ms. Greenberg’s handling of this situation can be summed up using her own words “Irresponsible” & “Unsophisticated”.
Basically, it was rude to gloat and dumb to badmouth an employer. And it was especially inconsiderate to Jeffrey Goldberg, whose writing is unfortunately tied to this controversy.
Goldberg reports that the Vaughan Hannigan photo agency just dropped her. She’s likely blacklisted from major media from now on, but honestly, I don’t think someone whose worked with Gwen Steffani really cares.
The Atlantic disgraced themselves when they published Lori Gottlieb last winter. Hiring Jill Greenberg was just a lapse in judgement.
Art by Ian Davis
Previously:
Synthetic Performances: Sylvere Lotringer, Second Life, and the Politics of Perversions
With Speed Graphic Cameras, Art is a Crime [Scene]
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