Out-Takes: Behind The Atlantic's McCain Cover [Bumped]

[ UPDATE: Monday - Video: Atlantic editor James Bennet takes a turn in the Fox barrel saying, in essence, "Who knew?." Magazine and article author are just "victims." Atlantic to apologize to McCain, suspend payment to Greenberg, contemplating lawsuit. Details at bottom of post. Scroll down.]

"Some of my artwork has been pretty anti-Bush, so maybe it was somewhat irresponsible for them [The Atlantic] to hire me.” - Jill Greenberg

The Atlantic Monthly's current cover by Beverly Hills photographer Jill Greenberg looks like this:

Not really Annie Leibovitz quality, but not even Annie's delivering that these days. ["One sees such portaits, and what can one say but...”Salieri."]

As far as it goes it is workmanlike enough and presents McCain, unlike the Obama covers we are used to seeing, without the halo. Given the level to which the owner and the staff of the Atlantic are in the tank for Obama -- the owner's wife, Katherine Brittain Bradley, is on record in one instance for $28,500.00 to committees supporting Barack Obama-- even the cover-lines are not half-bad if a bit half-hearted. I'd only remark that it is no accident that the Atlantic's editor approved the upper red slash bar with the words "Porn" and "Adultery" in it. Editors, especially those whose paycheck depends on displaying their bias for their boss, love those little gotcha games. I know. I played them too.

But that's not where the Atlantic cover story stops.

It's a question, you see, of the disposition of all the McCain "out-takes" from this shoot. Out-takes are images taken of a subject at a photo shoot that are not used for publication by the client commissioning them. Typically, when you hire a photographer for a shoot -- and I have hired dozens over the years -- the photographer delivers all the film or digital images taken to the editor and art director for their review and selection. In a professional shoot these can easily be dozens if not hundreds of images.

[Greenberg NSFW, children and other living things now on continued page]

But there seems to have been a "leakage" of some images between Jill Greenberg and her clients at the Atlantic. How intentional this is, how much the staff of The Atlantic colluded or did not collude with Ms Greenberg I have no way of knowing just yet. But at this moment Ms. Greenberg is displaying on her website (Hit refresh to cause the page to cycle) the following images which can only be based on out takes from the Senator McCain / Atlantic Monthly photo session [UPDATEWas it something I said? Greenberg has now removed the images below from rotation on her home page. The images below were there as of midnight, PST, Sept 14. The images are, as of now still visible via manipulator > enter > names > john mccain. UPDATE to Update: Those images are back at manipulator.com's home page. Look like Greenberg decided to double down and brazen it out.]



[Click images to enlarge]

IMAGE UPDATE: Here's one I missed to add to this "portfolio" of a degraded person. This one just about sums it what Jill Greenberg's soul is all about:

These images are, to any reasonably decent person, simply political pornography. There's just no other way to parse them.

To say Ms. Greenberg's use of this material in this way is "unprofessional" and does the subject (John McCain) and the client (The Atlantic Monthly) a disservice is to vastly understate the case. Not only has Ms. Greenberg exposed The Atlantic to charges of bias it may well have not intended, it turns out she was engaged in dealing with Senator McCain falsely as well. She has, indeed, bragged about it to PDNPulse, a professional photographers' journal. Here, in her own words, are what she did:

When The Atlantic called Jill Greenberg, a committed Democrat, to shoot a portrait of John McCain for its October cover, she rubbed her hands with glee..... After getting that shot, Greenberg asked McCain to “please come over here” for one more set-up before the 15-minute shoot was over. There, she had a beauty dish with a modeling light set up. “That’s what he thought he was being lit by,” Greenberg says. “But that wasn’t firing.” What was firing was a strobe positioned below him, which cast the horror movie shadows across his face and on the wall right behind him. “He had no idea he was being lit from below,” Greenberg says. And his handlers didn’t seem to notice it either. “I guess they’re not very sophisticated,” she adds - PDNPulse: How Jill Greenberg Really Feels About John McCain

So what we see here is a candidate for President showing up at a photo-session for a cover shot for a magazine he knows is not going to give him an Obama-pass, but still making time for it. Waiting for him is the contracted representative of that magazine, Jill Greenberg, who has literally set a trap for him and then lures him into it. She mocks the McCain staff for not being "very sophisticated" about lighting when, in truth, the lighting used for a professional photo session is very complicated. There are umbrella lights, fill spots, and a raft of others being used at any given time.

I imagine that Ms. Greenberg was in full charm mode with Senator McCain at the same time she was executing her little partisan plot. Indeed, I am certain she was nothing other than sweetness and light to him. What she was doing was quite another thing, a vile thing. Simply put, it was betrayal for a cheap political frisson for her.

Then Greenberg extended the betrayal to her Client, The Atlantic. She either did not deliver all the images of the shoot to the client or she began to manipulate them for her own uses as seen above. In this digital age, she probably ftp'd the images to The Atlantic, kept the originals on her own system, and then made the cheap and disgusting photoshops seen above.

I'm not sure how the art director of The Atlantic, Jason Treat, feels about this, even though I have written him requesting a reply. Still, during the years that I hired and worked with illustrative photographers, product photographers, news photographers, and fashion photographers in London and New York City, my art directors and myself always got all the film to review. Depending on the contract, the film would or would not go back to the photographer. When digital came it, it was always understood that the out-takes or images we commissioned and paid for would be kept confidential by the photographer -- as specified in the rights agreement. At the very least, we would have exclusive use of them for a considerable period of time.

One thing I do know is that if I, or any other editor or art director, ever caught a photographer using images held back for secondary profit outside of the contract, or using images in a way that would undercut our publication, we would pull that photographer's card out of the assignment rolodex. Not only that we would make it out business to tell other editors and art directors at other publications that such a photographer was never to be trusted again.

Ms. Greenberg may well have her opinions and is welcome to them. But to use the offices, reputation, and money of The Atlantic Monthly to fool and ridicule a United States Senator and candidate for President goes well beyond unprofessional conduct and into the area of fraud.

Elsewhere in the PDN article, Ms. Greenberg giggles, "I want to stir stuff up, but not to the point where I get audited if he becomes president.” Again we see the thin slime that passes for courage and conviction among those of Ms. Greenberg's ilk -- "I'dlike to be edgy and transgressive, I just don't want there to be any consequences for me."

Relax, Ms. Greenberg, and munch your tofu or carpet in complete security. There is no lamp post in your future. Should McCain be elected I am positive he won't take the time or use his power to audit Ms. Greenberg. That, as well as the dishonorable Ms. Greenberg herself, are things too far beneath Senator McCain for him to even notice.

But perhaps, if Ms. Greenberg's fraud were to become widely known in the advertising and publishing communities, it could well be the case that Ms. Greenberg has a lot less income to audit in the coming years.

You may recall that last week US Weekly played fast and loose with a Sarah Palin cover and it ended up costing that magazine around 10,000 subscribers as the cancellations flowed in. The Atlantic starts with a much smaller subscriber base than US Weekly and an almost non-existent news stand sale. May both shrink accordingly and increase the $5 million per year loss it is currently running. In addition, it might be a good thing if advertisers and media buyers were alerted to this episode. I'm going to do my share.

You see, I no longer write to editors about these frauds and outrages, I write to the advertisers. You should too.



Beverly Hills photographer Jill Greenberg's Current Client List. Proud to be associated with her?

UPDATE 2: The editor of The Atlantic weighs in:

"We stand by the picture we are running on our cover," said Atlantic editor James Bennet. "We feel it's a respectful portrait. We hope we'll be judged by that picture." But Bennet was appalled by Greenberg saying she tried to portray McCain in an unflattering way. "We feel totally blind-sided," he said. "Her behavior is outrageous. Incredibly unprofessional." - New York Post

UPDATE 3: Jeffery Goldberg, author of The Atlantic's McCain story has this to say: About that McCain Photo

"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."

UPDATE 4: Via email from the Atlantic's PR agency, I have just received the following statement by Atlantic editor James Bennet regarding this episode:

“We stand by the respectful image of John McCain that we used on our cover, and we expect to be judged by it. We were not aware of the manipulated and dishonest images Jill Greenberg had taken until this past Friday. When we contract with photographers for portraits, we don't vet them for their politics--instead, we assess their professional track records. Based on the portraits she had done of politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger and her work for publications like Time, Wired, and Portfolio, we expected Jill Greenberg, like the other photographers we work with, to behave professionally. Jill Greenberg has obviously not done that. She has, in fact, disgraced herself, and we are appalled by the manipulated images she has created for her Web site of John McCain.”

It has been my experience that if you have to get PR to push out statements on a Sunday, you know you are in trouble. Developing...

UPDATE 5: Atlantic Monthly Editor to Offer Apology to McCain for Photog’s Doctored Pics

Editor James Bennet said Greenberg behaved improperly and will not be paid for the session. He said the magazine is also 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,” Bennet told FOX News, adding that he is “already drafting a letter of apology” to McCain. “I mean this photographer went in there under our auspices to take a cover shot for us … but while she was there she behaved in an incredibly underhanded and unprofessional way,” he said.

James Bennet, editor of the Atlantic, turns in a required appearance on Fox to underscore that The Atlantic did not know what it was getting when it hired Jill Greenberg. What he says makes a certain amount of sense, but not complete sense.

I'm not buying the Bennet line that The Atlantic did not know what they were getting. Bennet may not have know about Greenberg's history. (Note that he is careful to use "I" throughout), but the art director must have known. The Greenberg "Crying Babies" story was news throughout the sphere, the media, the television, and the magazines. It reached international levels. The art director of the Atlantic, James Treat, certainly knew about Greenberg. He also knew, from the mere fact of working within The Atlantic, and most likely from editorial meetings with Bennet and the author, what the tone of the cover story was and what sort of image was likely to be approved.

This is common in magazines -- art directors being told how to slant an image -- and art directors listen carefully in order to assign a person most likely to win the editor's approval. If they don't come up with such an image they risk having to do the job over with much less time.

When it comes to covers, art directors are utterly under the control of the editorial and, especially, the publishing arms of the magazine. An interior illustration may be "owned by the art director, but the cover is owned by the business arm of the magazine first and foremost.

HT: Ace and Newsbusters

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