Jill Greenberg is a photographer that I was introduced to in Art History last year. We were read an article about the controvesy that surrounds her work and saw a video which featured some of her photo shoots. Greenberg is best known for her photos of crying children and animated animals. She has a style that is repeated throughout her work - carefully lit faces with glistening tears and dark backgrounds with a 'halo' of light around their heads. I really like this style which she describes as a "flattering frontal light, so the subject doesn't have to have any actual shine on his or her skin to appear shiny." She also said that "none of the kids had any makeup on and I also work on that shiny quality in postproduction." I also like how she crops into just the portrait for most of her photos to draw you to the childrens/animals faces.
Greenberg has been criticised for some of her photos because people claim that it is child abuse to make a child cry in the name of art. Greenberg would make the children cry by giving them something, such as a lollypop, and then taking it away. However, some children would just cry on their own. Greenberg said, "We would book 12 or so for one day, and see who we could make cry. At the end of the day I was not in a good mood. I don't like making little kids cry."
Although her photos are beautiful pieces of art, they also have a political statement behind them. When she was photographing her first crying child (the inspiration for this group of work), she began to think of a caption for the photograph, "Four More Years" which was associated with George Bush's re-election. She wanted to show the "current state of anxiety a lot of people are in about the future of the country" and even said, "Sometimes I feel like crying about the way things are going."
* quotes from "Crying Babies" by Jeffrey Elbies. June/July 2006. www.popphoto.com
