Jill Greenberg Puts Lipstick On John McCain’s Pig
[Photos by JILL GREENBERG]
PHOTO DISTRICT NEWS: 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.
She delivered the image the magazine asked for—a shot that makes the Republican presidential nominee look heroic. Greenberg is well known for her highly retouched images of bears and crying babies. But she didn’t bother to do much retouching on her McCain images. “I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she says.
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.
The Atlantic didn’t select the diabolical looking McCain for its cover. Greenberg is hoping to license that image to some other magazine (she negotiated a two-week embargo with The Atlantic so she could re-license images from the shoot before the election). MORE
WIKIPEDIA: “Karma” literally means “deed” or “act”, and more broadly names the universal principle of cause 
and effect, action and reaction, which Hindus believe governs all life. It is believed that only beings that can distinguish right from wrong, such as adult humans, can accumulate Karma. Animals and young children are not responsible to accumulate Karma as they are incapable of discriminating between right and wrong. However, all sentient beings can feel the effects of Karma, which are pleasure and pain.[4] Karma is not fate; humans are believed to act with free will, creating their own destinies. According to the Vedas, if an individual sows goodness, he or she will reap goodness; if one sows evil, he or she will reap evil.
THE NEW YORKER: Earlier this year, at a town-hall meeting at the Fantasy of Flight aircraft museum, in Polk City, Florida, Cindy McCain introduced her husband, the Republican Presidential nominee, with a speech about the nature of “the man.” There are, she said, many things “that make a great man, but being a good father and a good husband are most important to me.” She wore a tight black leather blazer over a black turtleneck, and her hair was styled stiffly in a ponytail. “I was working one day, one day a long, long time ago, in Bangladesh,” McCain said. “I stumbled upon a little girl in Mother Teresa’s orphanage, and she had a really bad cleft palate and she was sick and tiny and she was only ten weeks old. And I got to know her a little bit, and I was with her for quite a while. Mother Teresa—as only she could do at that time—prevailed upon me and said, You know, you can get help for her. You could, you can get her out . . . and, being a tenacious woman, I thought, Yeah! I can. Sure.”
McCain said that on the flight home from Bangkok she “realized that this child had chosen me and I could not give her up.” But there was something even more remarkable: “What you don’t know about this story is I didn’t tell my husband.” McCain smiled mischievously as she said that, and several members of the audience tittered. “I landed in Phoenix, Arizona, with this baby in my arms, and in front of a thousand reporters and a whole lot of people he whispered down to me and said, ‘Well, where’s she going to go?’ And I said, ‘I thought she’d come to our house.’ And he looked at her and he loved her just the way I have ever since. And I think that says a great deal about the man.”
McCain’s account of bringing home a daughter without first informing her husband of her decision has become the core of the Cindy stump speech. She revisits the narrative routinely in her brief but frequent campaign appearances, and the Republican National Committee offered a version of it in a video that was played before her speech at the Convention last week. Almost every friend of the McCains with whom I spoke offered his or her own retelling of the tale. It is fact and fable: last month, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Mother Teresa was not actually at that orphanage at the time of Cindy McCain’s visit. (The McCain campaign subsequently revised the story on its Web site.) The story certainly helps to portray John McCain as openhearted and charitable. But it also happens to reflect the nearly separate lives lived by the two McCains, and the peculiar defiance that is characteristic of Cindy—a woman who claims to pride herself on being traditional.
In her size-0 St. John skirt suits, and with her lacquered coiffures, Cindy McCain appears pampered and brittle. She was taken to a hospital with a sprained wrist after a fan shook her hand with too much gusto at a campaign event in Michigan last month. Her movements are quick and sharp—birdlike—and she often seems skittish, wary-eyed, and fidgety, fussing with her nails or her BlackBerry. McCain has said that she kept her phone with her at all times so that she wouldn’t miss a call from her son Jimmy, a marine, while he was in Iraq. But he returned in mid-February, and the BlackBerry remains in his mother’s hand much of the time. MORE
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September 14th, 2008 at 8:00 am
you must be proud of yourself.
September 14th, 2008 at 8:00 am
To openly admit your cruelness and then say the McCain staff is not very sophisticated. You need to take a lesson on not only sophistication but professionalism. Professionals keep business and politics separate.
September 14th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
It is no longer possible to equate “professionalism” with journalistic pursuit in this country. They have long ago abandoned the platform of objectively relaying information and news to the public and given in to their lust for power and the ability to pursue their bias and personal agendas on the public, in the “guise” of performing their jobs. They have forfeited all credibility and relevance from my viewpoint.
September 14th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Jill’s motivations remind me of the sadistic North Vietnamese torturers that took John McCain to task not just out of vengeance for attacking their homeland but out of shear evil pleasure seeing someone else be demeaned & humiliated. Jill will have to live with this for quite some time & suffer Karmic payback. Oh, I support Obama, too, so this is not about partisanship, it’s about decency.
September 14th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Jill you’ve reverted back to 5th grade antics– I thought you were a photo journalist–
September 14th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
I was taught a simple rule…….treat others the way you would want others to treat your family.
After the pictures and comments, I can’t imagine Jill even having the class to open a door for a stranger or saying thank you to a stranger opening a door for her.
September 14th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
You are pathetic. What a sorry ass excuse for a human being. Keep it up, though; everytime nuts like you do this, is another notch for Mccain / Palin to reach 270 on Nov 4. Keep it up.
By the way, this was also a tactic used by the Nazis to photograph the prisioners in their concentration camps. Great example for you to be following. What a classless act you are.
September 14th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Hai guyz, hugz from the librul media!
*muah*
September 15th, 2008 at 2:45 am
Your statements about “Karma” are quite true. As Jesus phrased it, “Cast your bread upon the waters AND THEY SHALL RETURN TO YOU after many days.” Jill Greenberg will come to a time in her life when all of her vindictiveness, pettiness, anger, deciet, and hubris come back to her.
September 15th, 2008 at 8:27 am
Wow! Bashing a American hero….and you take pictures, right?
I can thank Mr. McCain for serving my country…what can I thank YOU for?
September 15th, 2008 at 9:37 am
good for her. shows him for what he really is. hooray
September 15th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Good for you Jill. It is time for someone to show what McCain is really like. Yes he did a very good thing by serving his country but is he the only POW in America. That is all his answer to every question. He was a POW. Go to Washington, DC and you will see all the veterans living on the street with either both feet, an arm or two missing. Didn’t they serve their country too and come back to live on the street. McCain is a war monger just like Dimwitted Bush and that is all he has to offer the American people. He and Sarah Palin are the same idiot. Sarah Palin though, is worst because McCain is only using her but she does not care that she has made it more hard for us women to get ahead in America for the right reason, that we can do great things on our own. She is only trying to further her career at the expense of other women and her distorted family.
September 15th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Oh Jill, you are such the personification of the wackiness and juvenile antics that has come to characterize the liberal left. You can’t be trusted to behave professionally as a “photo journalist” how could you possibly be trusted to support the correct candidate to lead the free world. You certainly make it easier for those of us sitting on the fence to support Senator McCain.
September 15th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Thank you for helping me decide who I will be voting for this Presidential election. If you are what a Democrate represents, I have no doubt I am a Republican. Of course this only gives this classless,trashy Jill (somebody?) more publicity. I think she should have been investigated when she abused babies while photographing them. The parents of the babies should have been investigated too!
McCain will look back on this and laugh! GO BACK TO CANADA WHERE YOU WILL BE WELCOME. You may have a few supporters here in America, however any person as “tacky” as Jill SOMEBODY is not needed in our Wonderful America.
THANK YOU AGAIN FOR HELPING ME DECIDE WHO I WILL BE VOTING FOR. Your Democratic party should BAN you forever. According to seven others in my office
they will be voting for McCain. THANK YOU JILL, for helping the Repulican Pary!
September 15th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Jill Greenberg acted very unprofessional and down right mean. She needs to be more tolerant of people with different political views. Seek help Jill. Try to be a better person. ” There is no shame in kindness”
September 16th, 2008 at 12:51 am
If had ANY doubt who I was going to vote for..I NOW know it will be John McCain Thank you Jill Greenber for pushing me over the fence…the dirty dealing Dems…since Palin showed up they have gone nuts and NASTY…this was the last straw…this man served his country as a war hero, on the Senate if nothing else..as a Dem..talk about those that had “wives” Kennedy,” Clinton”, and let;s not forget Teddy in the pond and she was PREGNANT!!! and DIED…”I did not have sex with that woman Miss Kopchney”…..short term memory loss?????
Wat to go Ms Jill !! You have lost more than MY vote for the Dems on this one …Liberals ..can’t just be nice..
[You people, what a bunch of crybabies. First of all, Alice Reagan, the woman's name was MARY JO KOPECHNE. Look it up. If you are going to bark out irrelevant smears, at least have the courtesy to spell them right. Second of all, Jill Greenberg is an artist and entitled to express herself through her work as she sees fit. You may not like it, but that is the price we all pay for Free Speech in a free society. It's called the Constitution, look it up. Lastly, all of you, seem to have gotten the RNC memo on this one -- your outrage seems very well-rehearsed. But if you think ANYONE here actually believes than ANY ONE of you ever planned to vote for Obama before Jill Greenberg showed up, well, I've got another Bridge To Nowhere to sell you. -- The Ed.]
October 16th, 2009 at 5:42 am
As a Hindu, I am offended by the portrayal of John McCain as Ganesha, as it is defacing of the Ganapati.