The People vs. Jill Greenberg

If you pay me to take your photo, and I then take the photo you don't use and add blood and fangs to it to make a political statement and publish it on my website? How would you feel, how would you react and did I, the photographer cross an ethical line?

My answer is, yes I did. The reason is that you paid me to take your photo and I turned around and purposely tarnished your image.

If I had manipulated a random photo I had come across and I had no relation to you, then it would be deemed as slander and free speech.

But the fact that I was contacted to take your photo, meet you, talk with you, say good bye to you, and then manipulate the heck out of you with social and political statements. Then that's simply ethically wrong. You, your friends and publishers would probably never trust again.

That is exactly what happened recently with Jill Greenberg, the photographer and John McCain, the Republican Presidential hopeful and the Atlantic, the magazine.

The above image is the first image that popped up on her website a few days ago which started the controversy. It all stated as a simple cover job for the Atlantic magazine. They wanted a photo John McCain on their cover and contracted Jill Greenberg, a famous portrait photographer to take it.

According to PDN who interviewed Jill Greenberg she apparently asked McCain to step to the side after doing the main shoot (which she didn't do much retouching on, "I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,") and asked him to do a quick 15 minute photoshoot. She then took several moody back-lit pictures of McCain using a strobe light being projected from below to create a sinister look creating deep shadows across McCain's face. To this she said mockingly, "He had no idea he was being lit from below!" Something you would see a lot in old 1920s Bella Lugosi Frankenstein or Dracula movies.

After she had submitted the contractually obligated McCain photo to Atlantic for the front cover she then published the bloody shark teeth pic on her website. As you can see she superimposed a shark's mouth dripping blood on to McCain's face as well as publish a new image each day with different captions. One caption read "I am a bloodthirsty warmongerer" and another "I will have my girl kill Roe v Wade", reference to running mate Sarah Palin's anti-abortion stance, and posted them on her website.

When the magazine found out what Jill Greenberg had done they immediately published a public apology to John McCain for the explicit photo tinkering and messaging done by her on their website:

When we contract with photographers for portraits, we don't vet them for their politics—instead, we assess their professional track records. We had never worked with Jill Greenberg before (and, obviously, we will not work with her again). Based on the portraits she had done of politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger and her work for publications like Time, Wired, and Portfolio, we expected her, like the other photographers we work with, to behave professionally.

Jill Greenberg has obviously not done that. She has, in fact, disgraced herself, and we are appalled by the manipulated images she has created for her Web site of John McCain.

I can understand the Atlantic's position on this and I feel that she shouldn't have taken the job in the first place. By taking the money and manipulating the image she crossed a line.

When PDN asked her whether she had any reservations about taking the assignment she said, "I didn’t. It’s definitely exciting to shoot someone who is in the limelight like that. I am a pretty hard core Democrat. Some of my artwork has been pretty anti-Bush, so maybe it was somewhat irresponsible for them [The Atlantic] to hire me."

Another good point, she's a known hard core Democrat and has ran into controversy before for her 2004 photographic exhibition called, "Four More Years" [correction, End Times], where she displayed toddlers crying at the prospect of a second Bush presidential term. This sparked a torrent of outrage by parents and bystanders that found what she did as cruel and child abuse. Some called for her to be arrested.

Here's how she explains it, "The first little boy I shot, Liam, suddenly became hysterically upset. It reminded me of helplessness and anger I feel about our current political and social situation." "As a parent," she continues, "I have to reckon with the knowledge that our children will suffer for the mistakes our government is making. Their pain is a precursor of what is to come."

Personally I think the pictures stand for themselves and I get the connection. I'm just glad it wasn't any of my kids in shoot otherwise she'd of had a few nasty words from me.

So here we are, she crossed the line and she know's it. At the same time though I can understand what she was thinking, it's like telling a child to not take a cookie that's sitting right in front of her. She never hid her feelings towards the Republican party and she's crossed the line before. At the end of the day shouldn't the Atlantic have taken some of the responsibility. I think it all comes down to this line in their apology:

"...we don't vet them for their politics—instead, we assess their professional track records."

Duh, of course you do! Do ask a thief to hold your car keys?

When you have a moment, take a look at her other stuff. Jill Greenberg is actually a really good photographer and has done some great commercial work as well as some really capturing portait stuff. If you can, use her, just watch out if she asks you stand in front of a low light for 15 minutes.