Liberal photographer takes advantage of McCain photo shoot

Jill Greenberg is a well known photographer. I dabble in still photography on the side and always admired her style. She's done some controversial stuff in the past, but this takes the cake. Say what you want, but she's a professional and it was a scummy thing to do. (And, yes, I'd feel the same way if it happened to Obama, believe it or not.) She clearly used her access to McCain to do stuff she wasn't paid to do.

You can see the pics here.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/259817

Atlantic Monthly Used Photographer Who Admits To Manipulating McCain Photos

Liberal photographer Jill Greenberg was hired by The Atlantic to photograph John McCain for their cover and she now admits to deliberately manipulating photos according to an exposé done by PDN.

Jill Greenberg is a self-admitted hard core Democrat and while she didn't hesitate to take the job of photographing John McCain, she does say that it was "somewhat irresponsible" of The Atlantic to hire her given her previous work, according to her exposé in PDN.

The Atlantic did not use the deliberately manipulated photo of McCain and instead chose a different one, but Greenberg speaks about how she manipulated photos to make McCain intentionally diabolical looking. Greenberg also kept out-takes of the photo session to manipulate and use on her site and to sell to other publications.

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.

Photographs not used in the October edition of The Atlantic, taken during the same photo shoot and called "outtakes" are shown by American Digest, including manipulated photos showing blood around John McCain's mouth with shark's teeth inserted, one with lipstick around his lips, and the one she admitted to for the PDN piece with the lighting from the bottom giving him the diabolical look.

American Digest explains a bit about "outtakes."

It's a question, you see, of the disposition of all the McCain "out-takes" from this shoot. Out-takes are images taken of a subject at a photo shoot that are not used for publication by the client commissioning them. Typically, when you hire a photographer for a shoot -- and I have hired dozens over the years -- the photographer delivers all the film or digital images taken to the editor and art director for their review and selection. In a professional shoot these can easily be dozens if not hundreds of images.

But there seems to have been a "leakage" of some images between Jill Greenberg and her clients at the Atlantic. How intentional this is, how much the staff of The Atlantic colluded or did not collude with Ms Greenberg I have no way of knowing just yet. But at this moment Ms. Greenberg is displaying on her website (Hit refresh to cause the page to cycle) the following images which can only be based on out takes from the Senator McCain / Atlantic Monthly photo session:

You can also see a full spectrum of Greenberg's manipulated photos at ImageBam.

Whether The Atlantic was irresponsible for hiring Greenberg, as she stated she believed they might be, is a matter of opinion, but reading the full American digest article about this topic shows the owner of The Atlantic's wife, Katherine Brittain Bradley, is "on record in one instance for $28,500.00 to committees supporting Barack Obama," which has many questioning if The Atlantic deliberately chose Greenberg, not despite her bias but because of it.

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(Countdown to someone posting pics and making clever remarks...5...4...3...)

 

She got in a stink before with images of kids that she made to cry one way or another.




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

Jill Greenberg answers the critics who claim she abuses toddlers in the name of art

By Jeffrey Elbies
June/July 2006

When Jill Greenberg conceived the idea of photographing crying children back in 2004, she didn't anticipate the attention the project would bring to her fledgling art career, or the furor it would raise. Greenberg, who lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children, is already known as one of the country's most success commercial photographers, with work for ad clients like Microsoft, Kraft, and Procter & Gamble and magazines like New York and Time. She has emerged as a potent force in fine art with a series of acutely lit portraits of monkeys and apes, which in turn led to her work with children.


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.

How many kids did you shoot altogether?

Around 35. Some were the children of friends, plus my own daughter; others came from the Ford or Jet Set model agencies. Kid models aren't very expensive—not as expensive as monkeys, for example.

How did you get the kids to cry?

Mostly we did it by giving them something, a lollypop, and then taking it away. Some would just cry for no reason—my daughter did that; she didn't like standing on the apple box I used for a platform because it was a little wobbly. Some just wouldn't cry at all. For all the kids I worked really fast. We would book 12 or so for one day, and see who we could make cry. At the end of the day I was not in a good mood. I don't like making little kids cry.

The lighting is very dramatic. How did you accomplish

 

Let me clarify...

It's not that I object photoshopped pics. It's that she was able to get portraits under false pretenses and used them for her political agenda.