I can’t remember when I first heard about it, but a few google results suggest that back when JFK was running, people painted red nail polish Cardinal skull caps on quarters. “Kennedy quarters” were to remind (and frighten) others of his Catholic faith.
So what is a conservative now? Most remarkable about this election, Obama is smashing the electoral college. In the comments of an post on Georgia’s quite possibly Obama win, someone points out how the English Tory party outgrew its social platform. The shocking lack of diversity we saw at the Republican national convention is proof the party message has got to change. By 2042, minorities will be the majority. Already, Asians, Hispanics, and African-Americans overwhelmingly favor Democratic candidates. The world is also increasingly urbanizing. The GOP can’t keep ignoring people in cities (let alone calling us unpatriotic, elite, etc.) Great post on BLDGBLOG about this here. Bless her heart, Sarah Palin does show a glimmer of hope that the GOP is moving toward a modern image: “full civil rights equivalent to marriage” for gays, redefining gender roles, and sorta! pro-civil liberties. Right now, typically divided-government loving libertarians largely support Obama. Now it’s up to the GOP to decide whether they are going to put up Mike Huckabee (left economically, social conservative) or a libertarian (free-market, culturally liberal) in 2012. Guess which of the two can win. UPDATE: Hrag comments: “I think you misunderstood Palin’s endorsement of full civil right for gay couples. She said she thought they should be able to go into contracts…that’s not the same thing. Gwen Ifill didn’t clarify that and you’re the third person/blog I’ve heard misquote that. The gov’t has no role limiting personal contracts. What some of us in same-sex relationships want is a law that ensures that our partners are covered by our health insurance and that covers issues like immigration. What Palin said was nowhere near to ANY of that, on the other hand Biden supported equal rights under another name (civil unions).” UPDATE II: pretty good thread here on why Bobby Jindal will really have to tone down his biblical literalism to be considered in 2012. More on that here.
kakistocracy: Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens. (via, via.)
Commercial vs. Artistic: Can Jill Greenberg Have it Both Ways?
I just got back from a weekend out of town, and finished a large stack of work, so I’m not sure if I’m way behind on this web-controversy or not. I’m not even sure if this is a controversy or if it seems that way because I read some photography blogs and all of the Atlantic bloggers are in my RSS reader. But anyway here are some thoughts on Jill Greenburg’s photographs of John McCain.
Greenberg, of course, with a website called “The Manipulator” photographed John McCain for the recent cover story in The Atlantic. After finishing the frames for the cover shoot she asked the candidate to walk over to another side of the room where she pretended a beauty dish was lighting him, when the actual effect came from the ground. “He had no idea he was being lit from below,” she told the New York Post. Nor did his handlers, “I guess they’re not very sophisticated.” Later, Greenberg photoshoped these images and posted them on her blog. Most iconic: he appears sinister with bloody vampire fangs and the words, “I Am a Bloodthirsty Warmongerer.”
Jeffrey Goldberg is especially bothered as the controversy over these images undermines the cover story he penned, “The Wars of John McCain” which is well worth reading. (”John McCain believes the Vietnam War was winnable. Now he argues that an Obama administration would accept defeat in Iraq, with grave costs to American honor and national security. Is McCain’s quest for victory a reflection of an antiquated pre-Vietnam mind-set? Or of a commitment to principles we abandon at our peril? Is there any war McCain thinks can’t be won?”) From his blog:
I don’t know Greenberg (I count this as a blessing) and I can add nothing to what James Bennet told the Post except to say that Greenberg is quite obviously an indecent person who should not be working in magazine journalism. Every so often, journalists become deranged at the sight of certain candidates, and lose their bearings. Why, this has even happened in the case of John McCain once or twice. What I find truly astonishing is the blithe way in which she has tried to hurt this magazine.
The Atlantic says in an “Editor’s Note”, she “disgraced herself, and we are appalled by the manipulated images she has created for her Web site of John McCain.” Editor James Bennet wrote McCain an apology and is considering a lawsuit, (“She has violated the terms of our agreement with her, of our contract with her so we’re taking steps. So we’re looking into what steps we can see to do something about that.”) Greenberg, for her part, is hardly apologetic, and still has a photograph of McCain with a shadow on his face reading, “mccain voted against mlk day” on the front page of her website or something similar (it changes to another altered image if you refresh.)
Conservatives like Michelle Malkin are disgusted Greenberg was hired in the first place. In 2006, she exhibited a collection of photographs of crying children with political titles like “Grand Old Party” and “Four More Years”. She gave children candy and snatched it away while snapping an image. Thomas Hawk, who is better known for blogging about museums that forbid indoor photography, wrote she is a “Sick Woman Who Should Be Arrested and Charged With Child Abuse” back in 2006, as many leftie, pro-first amendment, tech-savvy people agreed. Here’s another post on Thinking Pictures explaining why this is different than debates surrounding Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe.
That summer Greenberg was interviewed in PopPhoto:
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.
I side with Jim Lewis’ assessment of her work in his otherwise meandering article for Slate:
This is the sort of art that makes one groan and roll one’s eyes. It’s political in the worst way: literal-minded, preachy as a bumper sticker, and, well, infantile. Moreover, the pictures themselves don’t look very interesting (for one thing, Greenberg seems to think that size—the photos are 42 inches by 50 inches—is a substitute for power). But lots of people make bad art without inspiring the kind of fury that Greenberg drew down upon herself. Her mistake was not in her meaning, but in her method….To provoke tears in order to take a picture is objectionable, and worthy of some condemnation. But it’s not as if she beat them with a belt because she wanted to photograph their bruises. On this front, it seems to me, Greenberg was wrong, and Hawk overreacted, and there isn’t much more to be said.
While she’s not much of an artist, she is a talented magazine photographer with a comical David Lachapelle-inspired point of view. Looking at the McCain images on Sunday, I forgot about the photos of the crying kids, but remembered her very clever portraits of Arnold Schwarzenegger for Wired. She nailed an 80s-nostalgic, harsh focus but idealistic, almost Sears Portrait-inspired look.
The other part of the controversy seems to be the way she staged the photo shoot after she finished with the frames for The Atlantic. While, everyone knows she could make him look like that with photoshop, it’s the authenticity of the image that is freaking people out.
When people who like you take candid pictures of you they tend to be good pictures. Not just because you are relaxed around them and likely don’t need to fake a smile. He or she will tell you to step out of the glare, or delete the picture where you look like you’re sneezing. Not so, with someone you barely know or don’t like. Photography is very much an art of editing. Witness the kind of candid shots cropped in negative ads to make the opposition look unsavory.
But a commercial photographer is no different than a graphic designer or architect in that he or she is working creatively for someone else’s interests. In the end, the photobloggers aren’t really siding with Michelle Malkin. They see it as less in terms of disrespect to McCain, than unprofessional conduct with a client that reflects poorly on their trade.
The best posts on Greenberg come from Mark Tucker with a list of ten things learned from the controversy, “First off, decide who you are. Are you an artist, or are you a commercial photographer? You need to know, because The Rules are really different…On a commission job, don’t screw the Subject, unless the Client is in on it. If it’s an Attack Piece, that’s fine, no problem. But make sure the magazine is in on it. When you’re working for a commission, I just can’t justify going off like that, and I’m talking about that awful bottom lit portrait; not even the horrid stuff that she did later, in Photoshop. McCain showed up, he stayed his alloted time, and he thought he wouldn’t be screwed.”
That she took photographs for her own use seems customary for a freelance photographer (”editorial rates are so lousy that if a photographer does NOT make her own image to get something more out of any project, that is just bad business,” writes one defense of Greenberg.) The photoshopping, isn’t really without precedent either, as many other blogs point to Arnold Newman’s portrait of Alfried Krupp. Jorg Colberg counters, “First, comparing Arnold Newman with a photographer who made a career out of taking heavily Photoshopped portraits of monkeys… I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel right… Second, Alfried Krupp was a convicted war criminal. In contrast, John McCain is his party’s candidate for the presidency. He’s not a war criminal. And whatever you might think of his positions (his support for the Iraq War, for example), that sets him very much apart from Alfried Krupp.”
Another Tucker post says, “If Greenberg was so intent on making a political statement, why did she speak to the press about this, which to me, dilutes her photographs, and puts the focus on her personally?” Tony Novak-Clifford agrees:
Unfortunately, Ms. Greenberg seems to have forgotten the old cliche “a picture is worth a thousand words”. In the public prints, no less, Jill denigrates McCain’s handlers as “unsophisticated”, her client at The Atlantic as “irresponsible” for hiring her based on her previous body of work. She then goes as far as to post manipulated images from the shoot on her website (since deleted as I understand) picturing the senator with bloody shark’s teeth and another picturing a chimpanzee defecating on his head.
We may have finally reached a time when the old maxim “there’s no such thing as bad publicity…” no longer rings true. The ultimate fallout over Ms. Greenberg’s handling of this situation can be summed up using her own words “Irresponsible” & “Unsophisticated”.
Basically, it was rude to gloat and dumb to badmouth an employer. And it was especially inconsiderate to Jeffrey Goldberg, whose writing is unfortunately tied to this controversy.
Goldberg reports that the Vaughan Hannigan photo agency just dropped her. She’s likely blacklisted from major media from now on, but honestly, I don’t think someone whose worked with Gwen Steffani really cares.
The Atlantic disgraced themselves when they published Lori Gottlieb last winter. Hiring Jill Greenberg was just a lapse in judgement.
Art by Ian Davis
Previously:
Synthetic Performances: Sylvere Lotringer, Second Life, and the Politics of Perversions
With Speed Graphic Cameras, Art is a Crime [Scene]
Matt Yglesias on Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: “One thing you might ask yourself, of course, is why would you do that? And it’s hard to say. I mean, even a starving man with a bowl of soup and no spoon is just going to drink directly from a bowl. Of course you can devise some kind of scenario in which it might be necessary to eat soup with a knife, but your basic gameplan in life is going to be to avoid being in those kind of situations. And much the same, it seems to me, with the lessons of counterinsurgency. This is very difficult stuff. Like eating soup with a knife. Your top policy priority should be to avoid the situations in which it arises.”
By now everyone knows Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews were fired as political co-anchors, and Rachel Maddow now hosts her own show. But a number of people can’t tune in to watch. In July, Comcast deleted MSNBC from basic cable service in markets in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and possibly other states. The same thing happened last year in Oregon. Comcast is offering subscribers a free digital cable box for the next 12 months. But how many people really call to complain? I watched the channel on the treadmill at my gym (which obviously cannot upgrade) and really miss getting angry enough to run that extra mile. I imagine most people shrugged and turned to CNN or FOX during the conventions.
“Although it may be an interesting and memorable history lesson, these are very different times, and re-enacting a violent day in history will do nothing to change the status quo. ” - Technoccult on the proposed re-enactment of the protests at the Democratic Convention of 1968.
“Take a look around the blogosphere and it seems that, overnight, everyone’s a Kremlinoligist” - Michael Moynihan.
“Women are liked better when they lose,” - Gloria Steinem (via.)
How to Frame the Internet: Attention and the New News Cycle
A narcissist enjoys punishment as much as praise. Maybe “enjoy” isn’t quite the right word, but criticism is preferable to no attention at all. The Abu Ghraib scandal is a classic example of our country’s narcissistic impulse. Attention was never on the Iraqi prisoner-victims. Instead we focused on how bad this made us look. How bad we were to let those bad people move up to high ranks.
The iconic photos were all about America — about us. And after several years, there is no singular image of an Iraq victim — out of the context of American imprisonment — that captured our attention the same way.
The Abu Ghraib images created a remote sense of guilt — anger more than sympathy. If the attention is on our own terribleness that means we can change (or pretend to change.) In the end, justice was carried out on those bad apple soldiers (or seemed that way.)
Compare that to the unblinking attention the famous image of Phan Thị Kim Phúc requires of a viewer. The photograph told the world the only way they could correct this wrongdoing and put an end to her suffering, was ending the Vietnam war entirely.
There are many photographs of the Iraq war as powerful as that picture of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, but none has marked the public consciousness the same way. I bet most people couldn’t recall a single image of a victim other than the Abu Ghraib photographs. I think that has to do with how we are adjusting to new ways of reading news.
The shift toward Internet as a primary news source didn’t cause the Iraq war, but certainly made it more convenient. You don’t have to eat your peas before desert, you don’t have to sit through fifteen minutes of world news to find out what celebrity got married today.
Maybe it is knowing that we can always access information about Iraq that keeps us from doing so in the present. If it were that ABC News only showed Iraq footage at 6 pm every night, maybe we’d be more likely to tune in because then the footage would feel like an event — something we had to know, that we could only glean within a certain time frame. Without an event framing it, the sense “I should watch this now” is lost to the understanding, “I can watch this later.”
The problem I see in terms of editing online content seems to be the absence of “frames.” Time frames as well as frames as a metaphor: ways of segmenting information so it doesn’t overlap with other content or ideas, complementary or not. Creating scarcity when there is abundance and understanding how to work with the desire that grows in anticipation of something.
I can’t remember the comedian — I want to say someone Saturday Night Live affiliated — but he was making a point about repetition in sketch comedy. You tell a joke once and it’s funny (well, sometimes, in the case of SNL.) Tell it again, it’s not funny. Tell it a third time it’s funny again. The next several times it’s really not funny, but if you keep repeating it after ten times and keep going, each of those times the joke is funny (this is, of course, a total perversion of the law of diminishing marginal returns.)
Art filmmakers are aware of the boredom they inflict when they hold a certain shot just a moment too long. Horror films especially are cruel games of anticipation. It is agonizing to watch the girl go down the steps to the basement tiptoe after tiptoe sooooo slowwwly.
The great change we are waiting for, the one that will make newsworthy information part of one’s daily media diet is online content that will acknowledge and work around a user’s lack of patience. This means creating an event out of what is being presented.
The challenge is designing a news website that encourage immediate and full attention. The Washington Post’s web chats with authors and public figures is a good example of this. The opportunity to communicate directly with a person of prominence cannot be done later, nor can one participate in a chat with only half his attention. I would also point to the book readings and events staged in Second Life, if Second Life didn’t seem so pet rock to me. A smart website would start using video conferencing software to have its writers interact with readers. The trick is not to archive the footage immediately. Make viewers mark in their calendars for it. Make them miss it if they miss it.
I really think a return to live chat is where web 3.0 (or whatever it is called) is going. Maybe we’ll also see a move toward call-in online video. Live email, instant messaging, and live Skype chats with the hosts.
Images by Yang Shaobin.
Update 7/23/08: Ekstasis made this great point:
This is why ARGs (Alternate Reality Games), like the famous I Love Bees, are so incredibly effetive, the reason I am so drawn to the old telephone poetry projects like Dial-A-Poem. Such projects make the passive recipient of information into an active participant…not “participant” in the more commonly used internet sense, not a creator of information, but a physically participatory comsumer of the given media. ARGs turn information consumption into a game, or at the very least an adventure. Something like Dial-A-Poem, or in the same way a radio call in show, turns the comsumption of media into a community actvity. It takes one outside of themselves into the very over-rated but nevertheless important realm of external reality. Everybody loves it, when they are participating. Everybody forgets about it when they go looking for “the next big thing.”
It’s true, the most exciting media right now is game-related. It will be interesting to see how the New York Times or others tries to implement games with their media (as I’m sure they will.) Wouldn’t it be great to get a free subscription to the Sunday paper if you get the highest score on a news quiz? Things like that will make such a difference.
Looking over this post again, which I didn’t really expect anyone to pay attention to (ha!) it seems like two different points and discontinuous. But the point of my intro on Abu Ghraib is that the one detail about the Iraq war people really know about and fixate on is more about us than about the Iraqis. It’s kind of like, if the only thing people knew about Vietnam were My Lai.
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