Many of you know that in addition to my communications work, I'm also a photographer. But for the most part, photos have not played into the discussion on this blog. Until now.

In a story that broke last week, it was reported that noted photographer Jill Greenberg shot a cover of John McCain for The Atlantic and purposefully set the lighting to cast him in a monstrous way. The Atlantic did not run this particular photo and chose another from the shoot for the cover.

However, Greenberg apparently has made the this editorialized image public, according to a post I saw on the PDN Pulse blog:

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.

There's more to the story if you're interested. The author of the McCain article has responded. And there's a very interesting discussion in the Strobist group on Flickr, to which I sometimes contribute.

This is a very sad moment, of course, as it is a shocking breach of journalistic ethics. For communicators, it demonstrates how important it is to scrutinize all means of communication -- not just words. The simple placement of a photographic strobe can have a great impact on public perception.