Stargazer said:
Just for the purposes of discussion - and lets be clear I'm being devil's advocate here - Sally Mann has in the past been accused of being manipulative and abusive towards her children.[...]
Actually, as soon as I saw this, one of my first thoughts was to compare her work with Sally Mann's.
Seems to me, Jill Greenberg is a good photographer to compare to Mann, being as she appears to be an Anti-Sally Mann or a Bizarro world Sally Mann.
Mann photographed her children in the entire range of their organic states. As far as I know, although she photographed them happy, sad, placid, hurt and sick, she never *caused* them to be crying, hurt or sick for the purpose of her photography.
Greenberg seems (to me) to be all about the subtext of her images, saying what they mean about the Bush administration, etc. Mann says over and over again that her images are solely about their face value, not any over-reaching symbology, though I suspect that what she really means is that it's up to each of us to assign personal meaning to her images. Mann's images are so completely archetypal, that I fail to see how you can view any of them and not connect them to numerous other experiences.
Should all images of children be only of them happy and smiling? The second image I ever took of my daughter was when she was 5-10 minutes old and crying her heart out. Instead of trying to get to to stop crying, I was photographing her. When my son was two or three, and we were dropping him off for his first day of daycare and he was bawling his eyes out. Yes, we comforted him, but I also photographed the occasion to save it for years in the future. Do these incidents make me abusive?
One of the issues at the core of this discussion is an issue central to reportage: is it irresponsible to photograph something negative instead of acting to prevent/change/stop it?
Granted, we're talking really about portraiture, but isn't some portraiture a form of reportage?
I really would like to see this thread come to a consensus about where the line is, or at least offer some well-reasoned opinions on same.
My opinions on Mann's and Greenberg's work couldn't be further apart.
If, in ten thousand years, all that was left of how our civilization values its children and how we regard their various forms of beauty was the photography of Sally Mann, future generations would have a much better view of us than if the representative work was popular television, Abercrombie and Fitch, or Saturday morning cartoons, for that matter.
I find Greenbergs work utterly repugnant, and her methods doubly so. Kid's lives have enough sense of confusion, abandonment and anguish without intentionally inflicting it on them. Her images look like she's gone crazy with just about every photoshop widget she could find. Artisticly, they're little better than that shot of the baby with the bowl of spaghetti dumped on her head that most of us probably saw in the seventies.
clearly, there's a line.
where is it?
-KwM-