The Case Against Jill Greenberg's "End Times"

If you'd prefer a satirical response to Greenberg's "End Times" addressed to the show's curator, Paul Kopeikin, see my Open Letter to Paul Kopeikin.

Instinct's a wonderful thing, isn't it, Mark? A pity it can't be photographed.

- Mrs. Stephens, Peeping Tom

Thomas Hawk made me start a blogroll.

The author of "Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection", who works as an investment adviser and uses a pen name to keep his work and blogging lives distinct, has created an uproar with his commentary about photographer Jill Greenberg's current exhibition “End Times.”

From a distance, the passions it has aroused lead us directly to the archtypal story of an artist-visionary who stirs up the cultural pot by exploring a “taboo” subject and riding the cultural buzz to the bank, only to be canonized later by the art historical community, preferably within her lifetime, as having created something brave and forward-thinking that had tapped the cultural pulse as well as making the artist and her agent in the marketplace tons of money.

This is different.

Jill Greenberg, for anyone who has not yet noticed, is exhibiting a series of close-up portraits of children under three years of age who are miserably, frightfully upset. (You too can view them here.) Ms. Greenberg has claimed that she made the toddlers cry by giving them a lollipop and then taking it away, a standard method for drawing tears among the young in Hollywood. We can all agree that children get upset by things that we would deem trivial, that artists are masters of illusion, and that there is no reason to suspect physical abuse occurred when shooting these photographs. But it seems clear, to myself and to many others, many of us parents, that the project clearly involved provoking children to a level of duress that goes far beyond the norm. Greenberg's simple "lollipop" story has begun to unravel; in an interview with American Photo magazine for example, she describes how frustrating it was to have parents "step out of the studio for a couple minutes" in vain attempts to make children cry who would not otherwise oblige. (Click here for a podcast.) In short, the rage, fear, and sadness of the photographed children is palpable and raw, and the resulting images are powerful, heartbreaking, and, to many viewers, morally indefensible.

Thomas Hawk’s reaction to this work is of the kind one might be subjected to after kicking a dog on the street or verbally abusing a cowering child in a shopping mall: that is, with a rage that strains to reach out through the web and call attention to the perpetrator’s actions in a publicly humiliating way. His first, explosive post on the subject back in April, "Jill Greenberg Is A Sick Woman Who Should Be Arrested and Charged With Child Abuse," lacked the nuanced language and damning praise of high art criticism, and sidestepped the confused and uncertain reactions typical of the popular press. Although he is a prolific digital photographer and self-avowed "technology enthusiast," Hawk wasted no words on Greenberg's skillful lighting or pristine Photoshopping of her subjects' crystalline tears, shimmering wet eyes, or the exaggerated, rashlike blush on the skin achieved through harsh lighting and skillful post-process adjustments. What Thomas Hawk saw was not an aesthetic question, but a moral one. This has placed him in the awkward position of an artistic progressive acting as a censor. As he wrote in his opening volley:

The ethics of photography are by no means simple - shooting strangers, permissions, capturing pain and suffering, many different subjects require that photographers think through their ethics before coming up with the best way to make and display their work. There are a lot of gray areas and a lot of different opinions on many different areas of what should be captured and what should not be captured. I generally fall into the camp of just about anything ought to be ethical for capture assuming it's natural and the photographer is working as a witness, bystander, artist, photojournalist, citizen journalist, etc. But what Jill Greenberg is doing makes me want to throw up. And it shouldn't be allowed.

The post is closing in on 150 comments to date, ranging from characterizations of Hawk as a lunatic to angry denunciations of his position to passionate agreement to relief that someone had spoken out. The effect of reading these comments is alternately agitating and mind-numbing, especially since they are crammed into the blog's comments section, a format poorly adapted to extended dialogue and rife with opportunities for miscommunication.

Defenders of Greenberg's work expressed a variety of objections and anxieties relating to Hawk's position, but throughout them all the blogger has developed and elaborated on his argument while gaining additional attention to his position. Since his original post, he has entertained accusations of libel from Greenberg's husband, Robert Green, read an interview with Greenberg in American Photo that quoted Hawk's blog but did not contact him to respond to untrue information about himself provided by the artist which served to discredit his position, and published four follow-up posts on the issue. The blog Boing-Boing brought many readers in the loop (including me) with their post a week ago, and several people in agreement with Hawk have written in to his blog regarding the status of calls to abuse-prevention agencies and media outlets demanding an investigation. Saturday's New York Times carried a brief about the controversy in its "What's Online" section (if you don't have an account, borrow one here).

The nature of this conflict, and one clue to its ongoing interest, is that many people recognize that this is something more than just another chapter in the ongoing Battle for Contemporary Art, in which progressive, urbane afficionadoes of challenging and complex artistic statements fend off naive or downright evil anti-art reactionaries. Of course, that doesn't stop many blog skimmers from assuming that's exactly what it is. To some, the debate over "End Times" is the same debate viewers had over Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" or Robert Mapplethorpe's S&M nudes, and they hustle to the fray with standards raised. As one anonymous commenter wrote:

You can hassle us all you want under the guise of preventing terrorism or saving children, but what we do is something on a higher level. We're expressing those very rights of freedom in photographs as an example of why we can never let the conservative, right-wingers in this country get their way. It's amazing Bush and backwards-thinking goons haven't already tried to stop Jill Greenberg from enjoying her civil rights by locking her up in Guantanamo Bay. We are artists, and just because we don't think the same way you may think when it comes to artistic subjects such as photographs of children, it doesn't mean you can dictate the rules we live by.

According to blogger Vern Gill, Robert Green brought the connection to the fore on his own blog, angrily defending his wife's work and declaring that Hawk "claims to be a lefty who has protested this that and the other thing, yet he uses tactics that would be all too familiar to Swift boat Veterans for Truth, the right wing nutbags." Curiously, his blog posts as they now appear jump from June 2 to June 27, the latter post offering only a cryptic expletive directed at Hawk and offering Hawk's real name. If Gill is telling the truth (and current comments graffitied in Green's own blog's suggest as much), Gill unwittingly preserved some words of Mr. Green's that the artist's husband later decided were better left unsaid. You can decide for yourself what Robert Green might have regretted committing to print by reading Gill's post here.

Most others who defended Greenberg's methods expressed a personal distaste for the series, particularly of her presentation of the photographs as a politically-charged expression of her own feelings about the Bush administration and the religious right's war on Islam. In her artist's statement for the show, Greenberg described how she felt when a child she was photographing in her studio burst into tears and helped spawn her Great Idea:

The first little boy I shot, Liam, suddenly became hysterica