Doc Searls revisits a story I noticed on BoingBoing a while ago, regarding the aftermath of a controversional photography exhibition in LA recently, pointing to a story on the LA Times site (which may well have scrolled off into SubscriberWorld, if you’re picking this up in my archives).
Swift recap: Jill Greenberg’s show, End Times, is a series of large (42″x50″) head-and-shoulders shots of children crying. She got the tears by the simple expedient of taking away a lolliop the children had just been given.

The work depicts how children would feel if they knew the state of the world they’re set to inherit, explained Greenberg, whose own daughter is featured in the show. “Our government is so corrupt, with all the cronyism and corporate lobbyists,” she said. “I just feel that our world is being ruined. And the environment — when I was pregnant, I kept thinking that I’d love to have a tuna fish sandwich, but I couldn’t because we’ve ruined our oceans.”

Many bloggers have been up in arms over this show, decrying it as exploitative. Many more, notably BoingBoing, have been up in arms over the questionable tactics employed by Greenberg’s cohorts against their most prominent antagonist, one Andrew Peterson who blogs under the pseudonym Thomas Hawke.
For the most part, I am underwhelmed by the arguments against the show itself. At the same time, I’m not entirely convinced by the rationale claimed for it by Greenberg. End Times is sensationalist, and Greenberg’s justification for it, whilst hard (read, pointless) to dispute, appears to serve only as a protective coating for the sensationalism which is the actual “payload” of the exhibition. Certainly I would dispute the claim in the gallery press release that the work is “soaked with realism”; the pictures are, by Greenberg’s admission, tricked up in Photoshop to accentuate the distress. They are closer to photorealism/superrealism, in the Chuck Close sense, as the short essay by Laura Arnspiger attached to the exhibition pages, acknowledges. The essay also comes close to acknowledging that the true significance of the show is precisely that it elicits a disproportionate response from the viewer, who imagines the photos to be depicting something far worse than the situation which provoked them. I don’t imagine that Jill Greenberg’s site is called manipulator.com for nothing.
The controversy reminds Doc of the autobiography of a child actor, Jackie Cooper, titled Please Don’t Shoot My Dog – which comes from Norman Taurog’s threat to shoot young Jackie’s dog if he couldn’t cry in Skippy. It reminds me of this picture, from the inner sleeve of Alice Cooper’s 1973 album, Billion Dollar Babies. Sorry about the low res image, it was absolutely the only copy Google Images could offer me. It was the first album I ever bought, but I can’t scan my copy of the original because it was destroyed years ago, in the course of one of my father’s (frequent and demented) rages. It isn’t entirely clear from this thumb-size image, but the baby Alice is holding (a) has eye make-up on and (b) is crying. I don’t think it was important for the picture that the baby should be crying, s/he just was. That is what babies do. I don’t recall any particular controversy about this picture at the time – after all there was Alice’s necrophilia anthem, and the charmingly titled Raped & Freezing for the “moral majority” to get excited about. It really rubbed father up the wrong way, though. Evidently he believed that, while it was perfectly fine for him to lash out violently at children (his own, and the pupils in his charge – he was a teacher) whenever the mood took him, pictorial documentation of children in any kind of distress was something to get outraged about. Which brings us back to disproportionate responses, I suppose, and my feeling about the given rationale for the End Times show, and the flavour of the response to it, equally. We’re all of us pointing away from ourselves and getting worked up about situations in which we are all implicated. The ruination of the planet is inextricably linked to our inability to face the realities which lie beneath our cosy, affluent western lives: the marketing of controversy, the (highly selective) objection to causing little children to cry, the tuna sandwich, and all the way back to the conditions under which the computer I’m presently typing into was manufactured – it’s all rotten, and it’s all a part of the process. Deal.
So, you can keep your bloody lollipop…