Jill Greenberg is The Manipulator

You’ve definitely seen photos by Jill Greenberg, razor-sharp, deeply saturated portraits, often with an angelic halo embracing her subjects. But these photos have also been the center of controversy, like when the ardent democrat took unflattering photos from a shoot with John McCain and altered them for her own website in a devastatingly witty series that made McCain look quite literally like a monster. The right came after her, claiming she tricked him into the shots, which she doesn’t deny. She shows her actual, unsigned contract with The Atlantic for the McCain shoot to prove that she didn’t actually do anything wrong, and she actually did give publication some attention (by the way, she made no money, was only supposed to be reimbursed for her materials—which she never was).

Jill Greenberg discusses the controversy and motivations behind the infamous McCain photo shoot.

Although so many of her portraits make those depicted in them look heroic, she is actually hired quite often to make people look ugly, she says. And ironically, exactly a year after the John McCain fiasco she was called in by GQ to shoot another person who disagreed with her politics: Glenn Beck (even though she didn’t think he’d agree in a million years—the photos eventually got picked up on the cover of Time). At that shoot, she made Glenn Beck cry, which was similar to another series she did that was fraught with controversy, End Times, where portraits of crying children that were named things like “Four More Years” and “Torture” to make statements about the Bush administration. She flips back and forth between wet-lashed children, their tears dripping onto their bare chests, and Glenn Beck’s overdramatic sobs (a video shows that she uses Vicks Vapor Rub right below the eyes to get grown men to cry), juxtaposing the two projects.

Greenberg brings the best out of Glenn Beck

Jill Greenberg and her crying babies

But where Glenn Beck’s portrait made it onto the cover of Time with nary a stir, in the case of End Times, a blogger came after her for supposedly traumatizing the children, resulting in a global fracas. “I knew they were powerful images but she didn’t expect the level of vitrol,” she says. “Apparently it’s controversial for children to cry? I don’t know, mine do it so much.” So she moved on to shooting bears, which were “somehow more safe” than children. She rounds out the session with a montage of bears, followed by some from her monkey series. For each, it’s apparent that her ability to bring out the good or evil in a human subject can also be used to give animals almost human-like personality. No word on how or if she’s successful in getting monkeys to cry. Her new book, Bear Portraits will be out this November.