How do you feel when you see a baby crying? Concerned? Troubled? Sympathetic? Well, how would you feel if you found out that the baby had been deliberately provoked to tears for the sake of “art”. The photographer Jill Greenberg intended her images of sobbing babies to be a metaphorical commentary on what she sees as the evils of the Bush administration and the dangerous influence of the evangelical religious right. But soon after her series End Times was exhibited in LA, Greenberg had a rude awakening. Rather than seeing the metaphor, people accused her of abusing the children, one of whom is her own daughter. A furious campaign was launched against Greenberg, spearheaded by an internet blogger, Andrew Peterson, a San Francisco investment adviser who has four young children. His initial blog read: “Jill Greenberg is a sick woman who should be arrested and charged with child abuse.” He went on: “She is taking babies, toddlers under three years old, stripping them of their clothes and then provoking them to various states of emotional distress, anger, rage, etc, so that she can then take photos of them this way to ‘illustrate her personal beliefs’. We should all be outraged by this horrible woman.”

Peterson’s attack precipitated an angry tirade: hundreds of internet postings, calls to Greenberg’s studio, and abusive e-mails. The exhibition’s website took 60,000 hits a day. And when American Photo magazine ran an interview with Greenberg and some of her pictures, the response was greater than for any story the magazine had covered since the 9/11 attacks. “I was just astounded to see hundreds of e-mails and letters pouring in. People are really furious,” said David Schonauer, the magazine’s editor-in-chief.

Sitting in her LA studio, Greenberg, 39, says: “I didn’t do this work for shock value. It hurt my feelings to be called a child abuser because I am the mother of two young children. I was trying to make images that made you feel something, because we are so inundated with images in our culture that oftentimes people don’t feel anything.”

Greenberg is one of the most successful commercial photographers in the US, having worked on campaigns for Microsoft and Procter & Gamble, and photographed celebrities such as David Bowie and Clint Eastwood. Seeking an idea for a new series of images, she happened to be photographing a young boy when he started crying. “The image was really powerful,” she says. “He was so upset, but he was crying for no reason. I decided to call the picture Four More Years because that was right after Bush’s re-inauguration in January 2005. I thought it would be interesting to do a series of powerful images that had these political titles.” Greenberg called child-model agencies and started jotting down titles for the images of the babies crying: Torture, Armageddon, and Shock and Awe. She says the model agencies and the parents of the young children were told exactly what she was planning to do, and were aware of the political message intended for the images. The process of provoking the babies to tears was simple. The children were given lollipops, then the mothers took the lollipops away, or left the room briefly. Gina Ramsey, the mother of Megan, who was two at the time and is featured in the photograph titled Torture, says: “Jill just made us real comfortable. She said any time we wanted to stop, or if there was an issue, to let her know. She did stop at one point and I went to comfort Megan. But I was the one holding the lollipop! And as soon as Megan got the lollipop back she was just fine and it was over.” Ramsey dismisses suggestions that the children were abused or damaged by the very brief experience. “Megan’s seen the pictures,” says Ramsey. “She was at the gallery opening. She goes, ‘You took my lollipop away!’ And I say, ‘Yes, and then what happened?’, and she says, ‘I got it back!’, and she’ll laugh about it.”

Greenberg is appalled that some people even saw a sexual context to the pictures. “It didn’t even occur to me that people might think that. A lot of the people who’ve been upset are men. I don’t know if it’s because they project their own desires on these images and they don’t know what to do with them and blame me.” So what’s next? Photographs of bears, she says. “I think bears can represent all the anger and scariness out there”.