Then Jill Greenberg shot the version below for her website:
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.
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.”
The follow-up from PDN, "After our posting Friday, media outlets around the country picked up our story. Hundreds of you (including, evidently, a lot of first-time PDN readers) posted comments. The reaction was overwhelmingly critical of Greenberg. Even among professional photographers, many said Greenberg acted unprofessionally.
Atlantic editor James Bennet released a statement saying Greenberg "disgraced herself, and we are appalled by the manipulated images she has created for her Web site of John McCain." He told Fox News that the magazine would not pay Greenberg for the shoot and was considering legal action. The writer of The Atlantic's cover story, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote on his blog that Greenberg "betrayed this magazine, and disgraced her profession."
Bill Hannigan of VAUGHAN HANNIGAN tells PDN today that the agency is no longer representing Greenberg, a decision that was "mutually agreed upon." UPDATE: Greenberg has also left the Montage Agency and is now repped by ArtMix Photography.
