Thomas Hawk draws our attention to photographer Jill Greenberg whose claim to fame is making children cry or making them angry so she can photograph them. The idea sounds sick and twisted, and Hawk is having none of it:

Don’t get me wrong. I am not opposed to a photographer capturing all emotions of humans. I think that capturing the tears of a child that naturally take place all the time (believe me, as a father of four I know) is one thing. But for her to say that she “manipulates her subjects to evoke an emotion,” and then citing things like giving them a lollipop and then taking it away from them just to see them cry and get angry and then shoot them, this is just wrong.

Irrespective of her statement as an artist this is evil. And it is evil to collect these images of children who through the bad judgment of their parents ultimately have no say.

When the Michael Jackson trial was going on people kept saying, what kind of parents would let their child spend the night alone in a room with Michael Jackson. It seemed absurd. And it seems absurd that any parent who loved their child would purposely take their children to Greenberg’s studio to then be tormented to the point of emotional outrage.

We should all be outraged by this horrible woman who has sought to somehow justify her actions under some kind of artistic immunity. This is not art, this is child abuse. It is the purposeful action of creating anger in a beautiful child for the sadistic purpose of making a name for herself as a pop artist.

Honestly, I couldn’t have said it better.

As Thomas notes, when you’re a photographer, you often make decisions based on whether or not something should be photographed. Sometimes a tender moment between two lovers, for example, while providing a great photographic opportunity would also be beyond any logical ethical limits and a complete invasion of people’s privacy. Greenberg, obviously, has no such scruples when it comes to the ethics of when and when not to take a photograph.

Take, for instance, this line from the gallery’s website:

Most of the toddlers in the “End Times” portraits are under three years old. “I had to learn the hard way that they had to be no older than three because beyond that they just don’t cry so easily,” Greenberg explains. “At that age, one needs to merely give them a lollipop and then take it away, et voila - pain and agony.”

I can’t even fathom what goes through a person’s head. She torments a child to get them to cry profoundly and then takes their picture, calls it art, and says it’s to “participate in a growing national dialogue.”

About child abuse?

Honestly, that’s all this is. Emotionally destroying child abuse, born of the arrogance that could only exist in the deluded mind of some California artist. For years and years we’ve heard from therapists the world over that every event in childhood shapes a person through their adult lives, and apparently every bit of that research has been lost on the likes of Jill Greenberg, who thinks it’s okay to emotionally abuse children as long as she gets a really good photograph out of it.

It’s disgusting.

I’m only going to post one of her pictures here, just so you can get an idea of the type of work we’re talking about here and in case the gallery run ends and the pictures are removed:

How artistic.

If someone did this to their kids, they’d be taken away from them…

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