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]
The new Scientific American has a feature on digital photo forensics. Here are 5 ways to spot a fake. It reminded me of an exhibit I saw at the old Newsmuseum of doctored Stalinist photos — (Is it still there?) Also, Debbie Nathan has a great post about the American Academy of Forensic Sciences conference. (Previously.)
Synthetic Performances: Sylvere Lotringer, Second Life, and the Politics of Perversions
“I don’t deny that my client was carrying a bomb. But this doesn’t prove he was going to use it. After all, I myself always carry with me all I’d need to commit a rape.”- 19th century French lawyer M. Henri de Rochefort defending his client, an anarchist, caught with a bomb.
What are we to make of the recent Supreme Court ruling on United States v. Williams? Now, just telling someone you have child pornography on your computer is a federal offense — even if you don’t. The New York Times wrote an editorial against the Supreme Court’s decision, explaining how, as much as they’d rather not stand on the perceived side of a child pornographer, “this law is drawn in a way that also criminalizes speech that should be protected by the First Amendment.”
Justice Scalia wrote there’s no “possibility that virtual child pornography or sex between youthful-looking adult actors might be covered by the term ‘simulated sexual intercourse,’” which further muddles this issue. Saying you have fake child porn is illegal, but the images are perfectly ok — no matter how skilled the photoshopping? A Boing Boing reader who once worked at Industrial Light + Magic, explained it well:
The first film adaptation of “Lolita” was directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962. As a concession to the MPAA, Kubrick raised Lolita’s age to fourteen, and largely desexualized her relationship with Humbert. As directed by Adrian Lyne (9 1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction), the 1997 version attempted to be truer to the source novel in those respects, and even showed a topless Lolita in the bedroom with Humbert.This is where my co-worker came in. Since the filmmakers were not legally able to film their underage actress topless in a sexual situation, they filmed her with a beige body stocking with X’s of electrical tape where her nipples would have been. They then re-filmed the same scene with a rather busty (but entirely legal) 18-year-old actress. My friend was then given the task of seamlessly tracking and compositing the nekkid 18-year-old bosoms onto the 14-year-old body.
Obviously there’s a difference between a professional VFX artist performing such manipulation for the sake of art, and some anonymous perv performing such manipulation for the sake of, er, self-manipulation. But how does one discriminate between these two goals? And more importantly, how does one /legally/ differentiate them? Defining what is and isn’t “art” has never been something that the legal system has shown itself to be particularly adept at.
“Virtual child pornography” is illegal in most countries, with many complications. Here its illegality is debatable. Lolita adaptations and hentai are exactly the kinds of things that could potentially be policed, as graphic images are prohibited under “obscenity” laws. (Virtual Bind explains the subtitles of this law.)
So what is child pornography, if it is not obscene? Everyone rational knows Bill Henson doesn’t deserve his current legal battle, nor do the many other artists who have found themselves defending their work to an excessively prude legal system. Philips Adams in his editorial “Lock up Lewis Carroll” points out the “paradox that nude photography of prepubescent girls was very popular in a Victorian society usually characterised as prudish.”
J.M. Barrie … would be viewed with deep suspicion today. The story of the boy who never grew up begins with a boy who never grew up, James himself. Just hours before his 14th birthday James’s brother David drowned in a skating accident and his mother took to her bed to weep for years. Realising that he came a poor second in his mother’s affections, James would try to get her attention by wearing David’s clothes.
He would write about lost mothers in adult novels as well as Peter Pan, and was happiest in the company of little boys. A pedophile? Perhaps, in a sense. But, as with Carroll, he has given a great gift to generations of children.
So what might seem simple isn’t. Although Barrie would certainly come under scrutiny today and invite trouble from the police, his tragic story should remind us to be cautious about moral panics. Does Henson have some psychological problems like Carroll and Barrie? No idea, but his photographs are a long way from Wonderland and Neverland. As prints sell for about $30,000, his audience is decidedly adult, affluent and very small. Until the present scandal, a few thousand might visit a Henson exhibition. Now business will boom; the censor is always the best publicist.
I read Sylvere Lotringer’s Overexposed: Perverting Perversions sometime just before the decision on United States v. Williams, and it’s further made me question child pornography laws. The book is blurbed by William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Kathy Acker. If you love any of those three authors (or all three, as I do,) you’ll really enjoy it.
The book explains aversion therapy (think A Clockwork Orange) as it was administered to sex offenders at Chicago’s Center for Sexual Behavior in the the 1980s. (The center no longer exists.) Lotringer brings up so many important points on how “perversions have no grammar of their own,” I’m surprised this book isn’t widely read.
Aversion therapy, as Lontringer explains, is really “boredom therapy.” From a review in Modern Painters: “While Lotringer is no satirist, his objections to the methods of (the composite character) Dr. Sachs and those like him are not so removed from those of Burgess. Our problem, as Lotringer sees it, is that we live in a Christian/Freudian world in which we are made to fear our awareness of our own capacity for free thinking; it is always the strategy of power to make us believe that we must be protected against ourselves. From the viewpoint of behavioral psychology, we are the first line of defense against our own fantasies and must be made to police ourselves for telltale signs of some psychic queerness… he in fact initially pitched Overexposed as a follow-up to The History of Sexuality. That it isn’t, due in part to his impatient assertions and his far-reaching aspirations. The author wants us to believe that in one therapy he has found the root of everything wrong with our culture.”
Nevertheless it makes for some interesting reading:
“What are you doing after the orgy?” Jean Baudrillard allegedly asked his partner in the middle of it all. Orgy, like the spectacle, is permanent. It’s not God’s death, but, boredom, American style. It’s the anxiety of the bulimic, the martyrdom of the obese, the obsessive fear of all those who monstrously consume themselves, out of sheer self-exhaustion, in order to better disappear…the great linguist Roman Jakobson rejected the idea of a language spoken by a single person as a “perverse fiction.” Idiolect was a kind of loner language prowling on the outskirts of communication. Now, it seems, the entire world has become idiolectal, speaking to no one, since communication now communicates nothing but itself.
I’d love to quote this book in its entirety, but this post is already long and that would be time consuming, but I will point out a few other interesting points. He explains how tenderness is usually expressed by l and m words, but k, t, and r, consonants tend to be used on words signifying aggression. “‘R,‘ which is produced erecta ad palatum lingua, is always associated with phallic violence. The same phenomena are said to exist in the language of chimpanzees, and, significantly, the Tibetans.”
Really intriguing was a section explaining how the psychiatrist would tease a normal desire out of what seemed to be a perversion. To give an PG-13 example: someone who gets off on the fantasy of a woman naked and hogtied, will, under examination, respond to the word breast, but not “rope” or “bound.” It’s not the binding he is drawn to, (not that there’s anything wrong with tying women up in good consensual fun.) The fantasy works with the right calculus of rote and forbidden. Another fantasy involving exposed breasts might be just as much of an erotic trigger. Context is important. Could the attraction several embarrassed men have drunkenly confessed to me, toward Natalie Portman in The Professional, be not her then delicate age, but the expectation of what she’d grow up to be?
What are we to make of Amanda Knox’s rape fantasy fiction or Cho Seung-Hui’s violent plays. And might we interpret the same of the so many people who fantasize outside the bounds of sexual conventions, but act out nothing? Did Bataille fuck an eye?
I first wrote about United States v. Williams last year, as it related to Second Life. Since then, Linden Labs has banned “age play,” even though it seems to fall within the non-obscene virtual child pornography limits.
The title of this post I stole from “Synthetic Performances,” a series of reenactments of historical performance art pieces, like Chris Burden’s Shoot, Vito Acconci’s Seedbed, and Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s Imponderabilia, set inside Second Life by (the avatars) of Eva and Franco Mattes. It is now showing at the Netherlands Media Art Institute. (via.) What makes it so amusing is the absence of shock value, indicative of all sexual activity on Second Life as seen by outsiders. It’s pathetic and comedic, no more pornographic than Barbie dolls positioned in a lewd way.
Images by Balthus
Related links
- Overexposed:Perverting Perversions , MIT Press
- Review of Overexposed in Modern Painters
- The Center for Sex Offender Management
- Brooklyn Rail interviews Sylvere Lotringer
- Don’t Look in the Basement
- Death and Sensuality by Georges Bataille
- Debate over Scorpion’s Virgin Killer.
- Wired, Inside Operation Candyman, the FBI’s crusade to sweep the Net clean of child abuse. (2001)
- Valleywag, “Sex Shopping in Second Life”
- New York magazine, Saving Justin Berry
- Debbie Nathan’s article on why journalists should have permission to see child pornography
- Fair, Perilous Reporting (On Debbie Nathan and Kurt Eichenwald)
- Does Snuff Exist? Google Video
- New Jersey sex offenders banned from internet, Ars Technica
- CNN, Who star released on bail
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