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Saturday, April 15, 2006

A fierce debate about the ethics of photographic portraiture recently worked its way through Thomas Hawke's Digital Connection. It began when Hawke and other posters on the blog accused Los Angeles celebrity portraitist Jill Greenberg of child abuse associated with the photographs in End Times, her upcoming gallery show at Paul Kopeikin.

Greenberg's portraits, which depict crying children, represent an inexcusable breach of photographic ethics, in Hawke's interpretation, because Greenberg is enjoying commercial and critical success based on the suffering that the children presumably endured while sitting for the shoot. According to her artist statement, Greenberg provoked the children to tears through such tricks as offering and then witholding a lollipop. Hawke characterized the results of this process as sickening, nauseating, pornographic and sadistic, and many posters on his blog agreed.

Other posters questioned the actual suffering endured by the children, and also challenged the presumed realism of the images. Greenberg and her production team are well known for their skills at photographic illustration and digital manipulation, and much of her celebrity work clearly strives for a kind of epic hyperreality that is quite consistent with what she shows us in the project. Can we really demonstrate via blog discourse that the childrens' distress in End Times is any more "real" than Drew Barrymore's motorcycling skills?

The corporate we that produces these posts for FogStock includes photographers and parents of young children, so we are personally very interested in the questions of ethics and truth raised by these photographs. We don't know whether or not Greenberg conducted the creation of her project in an ethical way, or whether any of the children in her project came to harm as a result of their participation. The answers to those questions might be unknowable, and nothing that is findable via Google is going to provide any epistemological certainty.

But the discourse wrapped around Greenberg's project also has embedded in it an unexamined subtext, one that relates to the presumed realism of photography, and which is instructive to the general practice of commercial imaging, including stock photography.

In commercial photography, fake realism is always better than real realism. There are a number of reasons for the validity of that principle, but the key issue is that commercial photography is largely about controlling risk. For successful imaging businesses, simultaneously creating provocative images and managing risk in all its forms is a process that typically distinguishes the successful from the wannabes. And Jill Greenberg is VERY successful.

Both immersed in the culture of Hollywood filmmaking, and adept at managing the special kinds of risks associated with celebrity portraiture, the corporate Greenberg almost certainly enveloped the End Times shoots in an intricate sequence of pre-production, casting, legal documentation, model compensation, editing and post-production. All of those tools and processes were directed at two ends: achieving a provocative image, and managing risk. Whether one agrees with the ethics of the shoot or not, the risk was managed via an organizational effort that seems almost inconceivable to anyone who hasn't been involved in the production of intricate cultural events.

To a certain extent, critical readings of Greenberg's portraits that make an essential connection between real suffering and representations of suffering are rooted in a photographic sensibility that runs with the Tides, that conceives of the culture of imagemaking in purely personal terms. But, as powerful as they might be, the Tides represent a worldview regarding the political economy of photographic imaging that has not yet been called to deal with institutional risk. Will they someday prove able?

posted by fogged @ 3:20 PM

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