More dirty camera tricks: How Jill Greenberg Really Feels About John McCain

[Chris_]

When The Atlantic called Jill Greenberg, a committed Democrat, to shoot a portrait of John McCain for its October cover, she rubbed her hands with glee.

She delivered the image the magazine asked for—a shot that makes the Republican presidential nominee look heroic. Greenberg is well known for her highly retouched images of bears and crying babies. But she didn’t bother to do much retouching on her McCain images. “I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she says.

Atlantic_mccain 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.


(read more at:
(http://www.pdnpulse.com/2008/09/how-jill-greenb.html?cid=130581828#comment-130581828

The article is amazing, and the commentary (more supporting this cheap and unprofessional trick than not).

I don't know about the rest of you, but I pride myself in doing the best of my ability, no matter who has hired me.  This person was hired to do some photographs of a prominent person. It is implicit (unless the client specifically directs otherwise) that the desire is to make the subject as good looking as possible.  Playing photo tricks to make McCain look as bad as possibleis not some sort of "artistic expression" (the photographer was not hired for that) but rather profoundly unprofessional and childish.

Many in the comments fear that the Photograph Industry will be hurt by this if it ever gets outside of their world.  Guess what: It will and it has.

N.B.: This was brought to light by Tess Anderson in the Sarah Palin/Charlie Gibson Camera tricks thread

[Willow]

When The Atlantic called Jill Greenberg, a committed Democrat, to shoot a portrait of John McCain for its October cover, she rubbed her hands with glee.

She delivered the image the magazine asked for—a shot that makes the Republican presidential nominee look heroic. Greenberg is well known for her highly retouched images of bears and crying babies. But she didn’t bother to do much retouching on her McCain images. “I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she says.

Atlantic_mccain 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.


(read more at:
(http://www.pdnpulse.com/2008/09/how-jill-greenb.html?cid=130581828#comment-130581828

The article is amazing, and the commentary (more supporting this cheap and unprofessional trick than not).

I don't know about the rest of you, but I pride myself in doing the best of my ability, no matter who has hired me.  This person was hired to do some photographs of a prominent person. It is implicit (unless the client specifically directs otherwise) that the desire is to make the subject as good looking as possible.  Playing photo tricks to make McCain look as bad as possibleis not some sort of "artistic expression" (the photographer was not hired for that) but rather profoundly unprofessional and childish.

Many in the comments fear that the Photograph Industry will be hurt by this if it ever gets outside of their world.  Guess what: It will and it has.

N.B.: This was brought to light by Tess Anderson in the Sarah Palin/Charlie Gibson Camera tricks thread

but I gotta ask, why would McCain choose her? She has a reputation dosen't she for this sort of thing?

[Willow]

retract that question. A magazine hired her, accepted and published the pictures. So she was not alone in her mischief.

[SaintLouieWoman]

What a witch. And the Atlantic should be ashamed.

[Chris_]

Quite a long list of replies there.  This one is very interesting:

Zachary Hooper of the Atlantic's PR agency, just sent me this via email:
===
Following up on your post about Jill Greenberg’s photos of John McCain, I wanted to share the following statement from James Bennet, editor of The Atlantic:

“We stand by the respectful image of John McCain that we used on our cover, and we expect to be judged by it. We were not aware of the manipulated and dishonest images Jill Greenberg had taken until this past Friday.

When we contract with photographers for portraits, we don't vet them for their politics--instead, we assess their professional track records. Based on the portraits she had done of politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger and her work for publications like Time, Wired, and Portfolio, we expected Jill Greenberg, 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.”
===

Posted by: vanderleun | September 14, 2008 at 06:34 PM

Looks like Greenberg may have burned herself -- and the publishing industry is a pretty small clique.

We can only hope.  I don't which makes it more delicious -- her childishness or her arrogance.

[Willow]

Good for the Atlantic.

[Tess Anderson]

This nut Jill does have a reputation for being an uber-moonbat - this is the same crazy bitch that tries to make young children cry in order to make some sort of political statement to feed her BDS:

I saw this little girl who'd come to a party with her mom, and she was beautiful, so I thought it might be interesting to photograph her. When they came to my studio, the mother brought along her toddler son, and I decided to shoot him too. We took off his shirt because it was dirty. He started crying on his own, and I shot that, and when I got the contact sheets back I thought, "This could go with a caption, 'Four More Years,'" like he was appalled at George Bush's reelection. The images have a real power—they immediately get under your skin. The emotion you see is just so compelling, yet they're beautiful at the same time. That was one of the things that interested me about the project—the strength and beauty of the images as images. I also thought they made a kind of political statement about the current state of anxiety a lot of people are in about the future of the country. Sometimes I just feel like crying about the way things are going.

http://www.popphoto.com/inamericanphotomagazine/2552/cry-babies.html

That's from an interview a couple of years back. She thinks her critics are the insane ones.

She has at least one child under the age of six, a psycho for a mommy. There's something to cry about.

[Chris_]

This nut Jill does have a reputation for being an uber-moonbat - this is the same crazy bitch that tries to make young children cry in order to make some sort of political statement to feed her BDS:

I saw this little girl who'd come to a party with her mom, and she was beautiful, so I thought it might be interesting to photograph her. When they came to my studio, the mother brought along her toddler son, and I decided to shoot him too. We took off his shirt because it was dirty. He started crying on his own, and I shot that, and when I got the contact sheets back I thought, "This could go with a caption, 'Four More Years,'" like he was appalled at George Bush's reelection. The images have a real power—they immediately get under your skin. The emotion you see is just so compelling, yet they're beautiful at the same time. That was one of the things that interested me about the project—the strength and beauty of the images as images. I also thought they made a kind of political statement about the current state of anxiety a lot of people are in about the future of the country. Sometimes I just feel like crying about the way things are going.

http://www.popphoto.com/inamericanphotomagazine/2552/cry-babies.html

That's from an interview a couple of years back. She thinks her critics are the insane ones.

She has at least one child under the age of six, a psycho for a mommy. There's something to cry about.

We can be sure this how her poor kid will look in a few years: