Above: “The Bloodthirsty Warmonger” – a Photoshop creation by photographer Jill Greenberg. She created this image to “stir stuff up”, but once the media started to stir Greenberg’s stuff up, she removed it (and others like it) from her website.
Here at TLS the month of October shall be dubbed “Shoptober”, and with the exception of any timely “in the news” types of Shops, TLS will be mainly devoted to the paranormal, the downright spooky and the creatures that go bump in the night! So get ready for the debunking of some ghosts and goblins – the world is not really as scary as it seems! (Except for your 401(k) statements. Those really are as scary as they seem.)
Since election day is drawing near here in the US, I thought I’d kick Shoptober off with THE McCAIN MONSTER (above)! Photographer Jill Greenberg was hired to photograph Presidential Candidate John McCain for the October cover of The Atlantic. Maybe it was the spirit the month, or the fact that Greenberg is a self-proclaimed “hard-core Democrat”, but the Master Photo Retoucher didn’t “touch up” the cover photo hardly at all.
“I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she told photography blog PDNPulse.
OK, I can respect that. You were “keeping it real”. The blog goes on to report…
After getting that shot, Greenberg asked McCain to “please come over here” for one more set-up before the 15-minute shoot was over. There, she had a beauty dish with a modeling light set up. “That’s what he thought he was being lit by,” Greenberg says. “But that wasn’t firing.”
What was firing was a strobe positioned below him, which cast the horror movie shadows across his face and on the wall right behind him. “He had no idea he was being lit from below,” Greenberg says. And his handlers didn’t seem to notice it either. “I guess they’re not very sophisticated,” she adds.
The Atlantic didn’t select the diabolical looking McCain for its cover. Greenberg is hoping to license that image to some other magazine (she negotiated a two-week embargo with The Atlantic so she could re-license images from the shoot before the election).
Warned that the image is just the kind of thing that will stir up the anti-media vitriol in the conservative blogosphere, Greenberg said, “Good. I want to stir stuff up, but not to the point where I get audited if he becomes president.”
That said, she goes on to explain that she’s thought about replacing McCain’s mouth with bloody shark teeth and displaying the image on a billboard with the message that the candidate is a bloodthirsty war monger.
Given her strong feelings about John McCain, we asked whether she had any reservations about taking the assignment in the first place.
“I didn’t,” she says. “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.”
I enjoy political art, but the story behind these images just seems so intentionally nasty it leaves a bad taste in my eyes. Greenberg scored a photo shoot with McCain under the premise that he was posing for a cover photo for The Atlantic, and she lead the folks at The Atlantic to believe she was professional enough to actually do the job she was hired to do. What she did was unethical and extremely unprofessional.
I might be more inclined to support Greenberg’s artistic expressions if she hadn’t pussed out and removed the images from her site when the media started buzzing about her altered photos – although still unethical, I could at least admire her balls. [If you want to see the rest of the images that have been removed from her site you can find them at American Digest.] If you are going to risk your professional cred just to make a political statement with your art, then stand behind that statement.
In other words: Get audited or go home.
Related articles…
Editor’s Note [The Atlantic]
How Jill Greenberg Really Feels About John McCain [PDNPulse]
Fallout From Jill Greenberg’s McCain Images [PDNPulse]
Photoshop and Political Cheap Shots: Photog Doctors McCain Pics to “Stir Things Up” [PC World]
Canadian photographer Jill Greenberg in trouble with The Atlantic over manipulated photos of John McCain [National Post]
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