Quoting (sometimes just a hair loosely) from Jill Greenberg’s ipodcast with American Photo back in April, looking at the same time of a picture of a crying child titled “Torture” that’s on the page offering the ipodcast…
Some of them cried totally on their own…the shoots last ten minutes, maybe fifteen minutes, it’s all set up….I don’t want to upset the children too much because children don’t really like, that’s not their natural habitat to be in a photo studio without their shirt on and sometimes that makes them cry…and sometimes we give them candy…and take it away…which is an interesting job for my photo assistant…most of which don’t have any children, honestly, being a mother of two children, small children, I know children cry all the time and two minutes later they’re perfectly happy so it’s not like I’m doing them any permanent psychic damage…sometimes I’ll have their moms step out of the studio for a couple of minutes and then come right back… sometimes they won’t cry…and that’s sort of frustrating because we’ve found some gorgeous children who sort of look at me like,,,yeah, you can take away my lollipop that’s not going to make me cry, I’m too professional, most of them are in fact child models…
I’ve always loved images of crying children. They’re so powerful, they’re so emotional and in this age where we’re all image saturated there are still some images that sort of cut through the rest and still make you feel something and still get you and I sort of like that and I like I can sort of have a little bit of a political message at the same time. I try not to take anything too seriously, it’s sort of funny in a way, these children are crying and you know the picture is called Grand Old Party…
Jill has written the faces of the crying children express her own despair over fundamentalism and Bush. Yet, her approach to the children puts her in the camp of what she says she’s fighting. She puts children in a situation where she betrays their trust then denies their emotions as valid (they are temporary tantrums, kids have tantrums) and reforms them to be vehicles of her own feelings.
Alice Miller, who was an Austrian psychoanalyst (and artist, I say “was” a psychoanalyst because she quit her practice) who wondered why her fellow people followed Hitler (now don’t freak that I’ve mentioned Hitler in the same posting as Jill, this paragraph has to do with Alice Miller), has written extensively on this in such books as “Thou Shalt Not Be Aware”. What happened in WWII is a complex, Miller dealing with one facet of it but it is an important facet. How denying the child’s emotions, invalidating and rewriting those emotions for them, sets a stage for cyclical abuse and enthusiastic support for leaders who manipulate and deny reality.How and why the very people they’re injuring can be supportive of them. How children will risk everything, even their own souls, to save their parents and the beliefs of their parents, because their parents are essentially god and god has told them that he/she must be held sacred above all. Nationalism comes straight out of it. It’s difficult for most people to escape this early training because they are brought up to not be aware of it, to be blind to it, to not respect their own feelings.
Ishiguro approaches the same suject in his “Remains of the Day”, an insightful book (made into a movie, you’re all aware) written from the point of view of a butler working for a Englishman who falls under sway of Hitler. Throughout, the butler denies his feelings and experrience in subjugation and devotion to his work, which he has been trained to do by his father (who was also a butler) and class defines honor as an absolute deniial of personal feelings and experience in deference to one’s work (a matter of dignity) and one’s employer (a matter of loyalty).
No, what Jill is doing doesn’t fall under the definition of child abuse. But it remains emotionally abusive and for me renders her work disingenuous.
Jill’s photos of the crying children tend to either arouse sympathetic emotions for a crying child, or a clinical distaste for her style of portraiture. It’s interesting that she set up the children and the audience (witnesses) go, “Ah, look at the poor child crying” which is what she wants, but she also set the child up. And then denied them the realty of their emotions. She betrayed trust but argues that she didn’t really, that the child is less guarded and thus it’s easy to make a three year old cry, for which reason she uses children under the age of three.
“Thou shalt not be aware”, as Alice Miller says, is one of the greatest harms we can do to people and children, denying their feelings, replacing them with our own perceptions through denying them their experience, making them our protectors, and doing it in such a way where they aren’t even aware of it. Where even a smidgen of awareness of conflict between one’s own truth and a manipuator’s remains, it creates a soul-ripping schizophrenic situation. Do you believe your own perceptions or do you deny them for sake of the adult…or the salesman, the conman. When that salesman approaches godhood, it’s safer to enter that state of non-awareness because the parent/god is the protector and one’s life. Without them you have no life, so the parent must be protected. (And I don’t mean “the parent is the child’s life” in the clinical way that people can say it which makes the child sound like a pariah or a flesh-eating disease.) So I must take exception with Jill because her methods are out of sync with what she says is her message. She perpetuates the same ill she says she intends to expose. Do I think Jill ought to be arrested for child abuse? No. Do I think she needs to examine again her perception of children? Yes.
Looking over the blogs and comments that defend Jill Greenberg, most take the attitude that hey kids cry, that’s what they do, quit making such a stupid fuss because that’s what kids do, they cry.
Or they start attacking Thomas Hawk, who gained attention for raising the fuss over Greenberg.
New York Times covered the story this past weekend.
CRY, BABIES — The blogger/photographer Thomas Hawk criticized the photographer Jill Greenberg for making toddlers cry and taking pictures of them. “Child abuse,” he called it (thomashawk.com). Ms. Greenberg also works as a commercial photographer and has shot photos for corporations. Her artistic work, “End Times,” is featured on the Web site of the Paul Kopeikin Gallery. A news release on the site says the pictures of distressed children are a commentary on religious fundamentalism and the war in Iraq (paulkopeikingallery.com).
Mr. Hawk does not buy it. Although “the children are not sexualized, I consider what she is doing child pornography of the worst kind,” he wrote.
She took umbrage — going so far, according to Mr. Hawk, as to contact his employer. She called him “insane” in an interview with American Photo magazine. To get the kids to cry she said she gave them lollipops and then took them away. Others cried without prompting. “Maybe getting kids to cry isn’t the nicest thing to do,” she said, “but I’m not causing anyone permanent psychological damage” (popphoto.com).
In taking on Mr. Hawk, she may be playing with fire. Previously, he took issue with the tactics of an online camera dealer on his blog, bringing the wrath of his readers down upon it. Now the dealer is out of business.
Of course, if you look at Thomas Hawk’s Saturday post (linked above) you’ll see the owner of the Paul Kopeikin Gallery (where Jill is showing) berating Thomas Hawk for the damage he’s doing then thanking him for the promotion as it has increased sales of Jill’s work.
Which is what I supposed would happen down the line of there is no bad press. Jill isn’t an online camera dealer. She’s selling art. Now it is controversial art. It’s a commodity. The people who are buying Greenberg’s images aren’t necessarily buying them because they appreciate any sort of political statement or her art. They are making an investment.
