One of my neighbors has a new yard decoration. It's a homemade sign with Calvin (that comic strip kid with the impish smile) urinating on the word "Obama."
I think I know how my neighbor is voting come this presidential election.
And I know how photographer Jill Greenberg is going to vote. After seeing her manipulated photo of a monkey defecating on the head of John McCain, I'm guessing Greenberg won't be supporting the Republican ticket.
Greenberg is more renowned for her photos of kids, apes (sans McCain and dung) and celebrities such as Clint Eastwood, Snoop Dogg, Lindsay Lohan and Tom Cruise. Greenberg's trademark style is to manipulate lighting and-or digitally alter her subjects ever so slightly, so that their skin appears with a surreal, angelic, even radioactive glow.
An exhibit of Greenberg's work opens Saturday at the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach. She'll speak there at 5 p.m. Saturday.
Greenberg shot the photo of McCain for the October issue of The Atlantic magazine, then took some of the outtakes and . . . er, monkeyed with them and posted them on her Web site, manipulator.com.
And then the stuff hit the fan -- or did it?
In these times, the news cycle salivates when Britney Spears forgets to wear panties or Alec Baldwin calls his 11-year-old daughter a thoughtless little pig. Greenberg's McCain-monkey shot, and another altered shot in which she made him look like a blood-drooling ghoul, seemed to be perfectly sensational "news" fodder.
But, surprisingly, reaction has been muted: a few outraged conservative blogs, Fox News (of course), some celebrity gossip and photography Web sites, and expressions of shock and disgust from The Atlantic (which stands by its cover).
I was surprised when Britney's Panty-gate became big news. Now I'm equally surprised that McCain-Monkey-gate hasn't. But I won't buy the conservative cry that we in the "mainstream liberal media" have buried the story.
Neither will I buy into the theory that media, from The New York Times to network and cable news, have escaped the clutches of celebrity-driven journalism.
However, perhaps media saw Greenberg's photos (now removed from her Web site) for what they are: what one observer called an "art stunt." And like any stunt (such as, say, Calvin whizzing on the name of a presidential candidate), this one raised a few eyebrows but didn't deserve a lot of attention.
But McCain-Monkey-gate has obscured a bigger issue. When I first saw Greenberg's McCain shot on The Atlantic cover (before I saw the monkey shot), I felt discombobulated. At a glance, McCain appears normal, stately, like a determined war hero.
But the longer I looked at the pic, the more McCain appeared surreal, disturbing, even a tad sinister.
Greenberg, a professed "hardcore Democrat," had achieved more with a subtle, sly manner than with her jokey, juvenile, over-the-top creations.
That's a lesson we each should keep in mind as we consume our daily diet of media.
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