seeing & being seen

Via Photoshop Disasters, a blog that manages to provide fairly non-stop amusement, the story of an eerie-cornfield-apparition that didn’t quite get brushed out of an image for Sports Illustrated. Oops.

Kangaroo Rat. National Park Service.

From the AP:

Scientists plan to use satellite photos to count Giant Kangaroo Rats, the first-ever monitoring of an endangered species from outer space.

Scientists will examine images taken from the same satellite used by Israeli defense forces to find the circular patches of earth denuded by the rats as they gather food around their burrows. From that they plan to get the first-ever accurate population count of the rodents, a bellwether for the health of a parched plains environment.

Jill Greenberg, from End Times series (left) and Monkeys and Apes series (right)

Jill Greenberg has (again) caused a fairly significant stir in the blogs-about-photography world. She first ruffled some ethical feathers a few years ago for a group of work entitled End Times, in which she made small children bawl by giving, and them removing, lovely lollipops, and titling the work to indicate that the children’s subsequent, and understandable, wails were caused by their fear/horror in the face of a future of climate change, the Bush era, etc. She is also well known for an extensive series of heavily manipulated portraits of apes & monkeys.

Jill Greenberg

As reported here, the more recent incident involved a portrait shoot of John McCain for The Atlantic, (cover photograph, above) in which she took some deliberately unflattering outtakes and manipulated them in various ways to convey her not-so-subtle lack of affection towards the subject, then posted them to her website. The Atlantic, which surely hired Greenberg for her signature approach to slick and glossy portraiture and lighting, has since issued an apology:

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. 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.

All sorts of interesting questions are raised by this, in terms of professional practice (many commercial photographers are, understandably, quite angry about this) and artistic license, not to mention photographer/subject/portrait dynamics.

Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos

Apologies for recent dearth of postings. More discipline soon, promised. In the meantime, in the my-perpetually-favorite-photographers-section, NYTimes reviews two current Koudelka shows in New York.

Bill Jay’s 40-year archive of portraits of photographers… Highly addictive browsing, I found.

Bill Jay Robert Adams after a lecture in California, 1979