During 1997, two Christian activists, James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Randall Terry, founder of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, began condemning the works of Jock Sturges and David Hamilton, both of whom have photographed nude children. Protests, including the destruction of unbought copies of a Sturges book in Barnes & Noble stores, hit about 40 cities.
In November, protests developed into prosecutions. A grand jury in Tennessee indicted the bookstore chain on the misdemeanor charge of distributing "material harmful to minors" without keeping it wrapped in plastic (to prevent browsers from looking at it) and five feet or more off the floor. The books in question are Hamilton's The Age of Innocence and Sturges's The Last Days of Summer and Radiant Identities. All three include nude photographs of children, but none of them are in sexual situations.
In February, two criminal indictments for violating child pornography statutes were brought against Barnes & Noble in Alabama for selling Radiant Identities and The Age of Innocence. Between the two indictments, Barnes & Noble faces 35 counts, with a potential $10,000 fine per count.
In further action, a citizen petition in Kansas has led to an inquiry by a special prosecutor and a grand jury into whether selling Sturges's books violates child porn laws. California Assemblyman Bruce Thompson is proposing a state law with second-offense fines of up to $10,000 for selling books presenting kids engaged in what he defines as "sexual conduct." And UPI reported on February 18 that the U.S. Justice Department is investigating the works of Sturges and Hamilton for child porn violations as part of an FBI undercover operation known as "Innocent Images."
Sturges's work was the subject of a 1991 anti-child porn crusade in San Francisco, but the grand jury refused to indict. His work appears in many museums, including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Reason 5/1/98)
Jewish theologian and talkshow host Dennis Prager strongly opposes pictures of naked children. He believes in preserving children's innocence. DP has little problem with adult pornography.
On his 3/13/98 KABC radio show, DP talked about the recent Barnes and Noble case for selling a book with pictures of nude children. DP supports book stores ordering any books. But he says that because space is limited, stores must choose which books they stock, and he wishes they did not stock books with naked kids.
DP says that such photos are not art, and that society loses nothing by banning them.
DP thought it was disgusting that a 65 year old man, photographer David Hamilton, liked to photography naked little girls. That Hamilton thought them erotic.
A society that does not have laws to protect its children does not deserve to survive, says DP. It should not be a conservative-liberal-male-female issue. It is a matter of decency.
"The spectacle of 65-year old men photographing 13-year old girls with their legs spread is wrong. That it can be done artistically is irrelevant. Murder can be done artistically."
Prager quoted from this 3-8-98 LA TIMES article:
ATLANTA--The girl in the photograph is the archetypal kid sister. No more than 12, her body is a boy's, but her face is pure woman. The contrast is so intense that you almost don't notice: She's wearing a defiant gaze and nothing else.
The photograph is alluring, arresting, fine art in the eyes of many. But in Alabama and South Carolina and Colorado and elsewhere, it's the ultimate indecency. No matter how many museums hang it on their walls, the photograph is seen in parts of America as "child pornography."
And one day soon the courts may see it that way too.
From Darwin to Mapplethorpe, from Elvis to 2 Live Crew, the frontiers of free speech are forever being explored and forever being fought over. So, two weeks ago, it seemed like just another day in the life of the 1stAmendment when an Alabama grand jury indicted Barnes & Noble bookseller for peddling "obscenity," namely two coffee-table books from two reputable publishers.
But this is not your father's 1st Amendment fight. This bitter debate about acclaimed photographers David Hamilton and Jock Sturges centers on both the intent and the content of their work, on their "backgrounds" as well as their foregrounds, on Hamilton's unorthodox beliefs about young girls as much as Sturges' disturbing behavior toward one.
Specifically, the Alabama grand jury cited "The Age of Innocence," by Hamilton, and "Radiant Identities," by Sturges, two books of large-format, high-quality photographs thought by thousands of critics and consumers to be socially acceptable, even wonderful.
But both books focus almost exclusively on naked girls, poised on the precipice of puberty. Sometimes the girls are featured suggestively, other times erotically. In a typical Sturges photograph, a girl about 10years old lies back on a futon, her arms outstretched, her exposed genitals drawing the viewer's eye to the center of the frame. In a typical Hamilton photograph, a girl of 13 gazes at her new breasts, touching them tentatively.
"This presents a case squarely in the middle, in which artistic merit is claimed to come precisely from the eroticism of children," according to Jack Balkin, Knight professor of constitutional law and the 1stAmendment at Yale Law School.
In other words, one day there may be heated courtroom arguments not only over whether a work of art is obscene per se but also whether the artist is.
"It raises the question of whether you want to characterize these folks as sleazy panderers or serious artists," Balkin says. "That's really what's at stake."
Also at stake is Sturges' freedom. For the second time in eight years, he's the target of a U.S. Justice Department investigation. Department spokesman John Russell won't comment, except to say "we're reviewing the work" to see if it constitutes child pornography.
But the last time Sturges was investigated by the federal government, in 1990, police and federal agents stormed his San Francisco studio, where they claimed to find photographs of nude children (genitals "vividly displayed," according to one newspaper account that quoted FBI agents) along with letters and photographs that suggested Sturges had engaged in a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl. It's a relationship Sturges doesn't deny.
Prager has little problem with families being naked, but he didn't want them to sell photos of their naked kids.
Even if it is published by a big publisher and packaged in a lovely book, it is still disgusting.
To be attracted sexually to a non-sexual being - a prepubescent child - is sick, says DP.
On 6/15/98, Luke F-rd interviewed porn talent Reb Sawitz.
Luke: Who was Ed Leja?
Reb: A nudist and a nudist photographer. [Ed made lush books of nude photography. He was eventually arrested for taking pictures of naked children.]
Reb pauses. He does not like talking about this subject.
"Ed told everybody one thing, and was arrested [for taking photos of nude children]…running around in their own homes, in their own backyards. On the weekends, he often shot at the nudist camp.
[Veteran porn photographer Ron Vogel and his family are also veteran nudists.]
I don't know what the final outcome of Leja's case. It seemed like everyone involved in it was sooner or later cut loose [released from the charges]. Ed and his much younger wife (30 years) later divorced.
Luke: You got talent for Ed?
Reb: I got families, mothers and kids. These were not sexual involvement. This was nudism. Ed Leja was a nudist. But because it involved people who were not 18… You've [Luke] been here several times. You see how I always ask people for ID.
Luke: Leja used to shoot kids nude.
Reb: He shots hundreds of them. He put out a book called Moppets. I don't even like talking about it.
Luke: You helped set him up with families, families of some of the models… Their children.
Reb: It wasn't sex. It was legal. It was nudism. If they go to San Bernadino to a nudist colony on the weekend, what is wrong with shooting them at their own home? Nothing.
Luke: I hear that he also shot your daughter, naked, when she was a kid?
Reb: Just naked. Running around the house playing with her toys.
Luke: That doesn't bother you?
Reb: The only people this would bother are people with sick minds, because this did not involve sex. Anybody who knew me, knew that the kids liked to run around nude… They were nudists. Nothing against the law. It was what Lloyd Martin perceived in his own sick mind. He had a job to do. He had so many hours in which he had to do something. If he didn't bust me, they had to bust someone else. I don't know if they [Lloyd Martin] got a conviction on anything.
On RAME, Hart Williams responds:
I find that Mr. Ford has managed to shove his agenda right up his own ass. If he doesn't know anything about the (rather extensive) nudist movement on the West Coast (say, '50s through '70s) that's HIS failure as a clueless, dirty-minded imbecile.
For Ford to try and "set up" Reb with this crap seems to me beyond the bounds of "journalism" and more akin to Pat Robertson's "CBN News," which is nothing more than a phony front for propaganda.
For Luke's edification, the nudist movement was a fairly well known phenomenon, known for its highfalutin' rhetoric and ideals, and for its very careful taboos regarding sexuality -- which they correctly perceived would open them up to witch hunts, et al, from those sad puritans who can't seem to disentangle "nudity" from "sexuality."
If he were truly interested in "truth" and not pushing his increasingly ugly "Godfather meets Bambi" agenda, he'd interview the folks at Elysium in Topanga Canyon, and find out what the nudist movement was all about.
I am reminded of the vicious slander that pursued Lewis Carroll from the 'Sixties on, when it was decided that since Carroll liked to take idyllic photos of naked children, he MUST be a pedophile. Therefore, the dirty minded "scholars" dutifully speculated, Carroll was a pedophile, and the "Alice" books were thinly-veiled "child-love" books.
Recently it was reported that the reason for certain missing pages in Carroll's journals and obscure references to "sin" were NOT because of any perversion on Carroll's part, but because Carroll had been having an affair with Alice's MOTHER (the Bishop's, and therefore his boss' wife -- Carroll was a Reverend). Big whoop to us: major moral crisis for the Good Victorian professor.
The only "perversion" involved existed in the dirty minds of the "hip" scholars, not in the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's(Carroll was a nom de plume) mind.
While I have generally supported Mr. Ford's efforts in the past, I have a real problem with his trying to "get" Reb and Gerri, who are personal friends, and whom I have *never* known to be other than honorable.
Sad that a little notoriety has managed to do what a heaping helping of scorn could not: Turn Ford into a tabloid-style vendor of sleaze and innuendo.
From the 5/1/95 New Republic:
Sally Mann and Jock Sturges are two very different photographers whose work has in common a single factor: the depiction of the nude bodies of children. This has caused much lumping together of the two, and it has caused some people to notice no other aspect of their work. It has also caused them a lot of grief, Sturges in particular. His studio in San Francisco was raided in 1990 by FBI agents, who seized thousands of his prints and negatives. Although a grand jury subsequently refused to indict him and his work was recovered, similar harassment has been visited upon many other photographers who have photographed children in the nude without prurient intent.
Child pornography, of course, does exist: all imaginable depravities have their networks and patrons. But in recent years it has also become a folk horror, like Satanism, that excited freelance inquisitors find lurking everywhere. Last year, a janitor at Wayne State University turned in an art professor after finding nude pictures of her 2-year- old daughter in the trash (the prosecutor declined to press charges). And it was a processing lab that informed on Ejlat Feuer, a New Jersey manufacturer and a student at the International Center of Photography, whose 110 nude photos of his 6-year-old daughter, taken for an assignment, were deemed by law enforcement authorities to be grounds for jailing Feuer overnight and then barring him from contact with his family for ten weeks. (Having spent some $80,000 on resulting expenses, Feuer compromised with county prosecutors, who agreed to forgo a trial in exchange for his spending a year in a probation program.)
I can't judge Feuer's photographs, having only read a couple of newspaper reports about his case. It's conceivable, I suppose, that darkly prurient motives could exist even in a case where the photographer was fulfilling a class assignment, took the pictures in the presence of his wife and the children's nanny and blithely sent the rolls to the Kodalux Service for developing, and his now 7-year-old subject, after the ordeal, is eager to be photographed again. But does it seem likely? What were the lab people and police and prosecutors thinking?
Certainly there is a desire to protect childhood innocence in an age when the margins of such innocence are rapidly shrinking (for reasons that are not all attributable to pollution by the media--we know, for instance, that the median age for the onset of menstruation has decreased by as much as six years since the newly fashionable Victorian era). At work, too, is a traditional American anti-intellectualism and distrust of art. No one needs to be reminded of how the difficult questions tackled by sophisticated art these days have been met with baffled outrage by a happily ignorant public exposed piecemeal to such art by the sensation-seeking press.
Still, the nudity of children has historically been about as hazardous a subject matter for representation as sunsets and flowers. Think of all those putti. Look at family albums. (My own includes a splendid nude of my mother, sitting on a rug, taken by a studio photographer when she was 3 or so, with full sanction of her fanatically Roman Catholic rural Belgian family.) And then you might read Leo Steinberg' s extraordinary The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983), pausing first to look at all those fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings of the infant Jesus, with their startling emphasis on the incarnate genitalia. Steinberg's thesis is too profound and too complicated for justice to be done to it here; suffice it to say that Christ's genitals are shown as proof of the divine made both humbly and triumphantly human.
In such a context, Jock Sturges seems both decorous and rooted in immemorial convention. There is nothing furtive about his pictures. They are frequently taken in public or semi-public locations: nude beaches in France, swimming holes in Northern California. His young women, and a few young men, who mostly appear to range in age from a few years before to a few years past puberty, are pictured squarely, looking straight at the lens, absolutely self-possessed in their acknowledgment of their bodies. The instances in which the subjects are not making eye contact are primarily tableaux of sunbathing figures, the bodies abstracted into decorative patterns; numerous clothed precedents of this motif exist, by photographers as diverse as Weegee and Martin Munkacsi.
Sturges has taken many mother-and-child studies of the most traditional stripe, whether or not their constituent parties are in stages of undress, as well as some striking nude-family groupings. These people are naturists, which means that, in contrast to the more resolutely unclad nudists, they put on or leave off articles of clothing according to their degree of comfort, dictated mostly by temperature. Some of the adults in Sturges's photographs possess appropriately aging bodies, but all are good-looking. None of them, unlike the nudists photographed by Diane Arbus, is a grotesque.
Sturges's quarry could not be simpler or more self-evident: he is devoted to the beauty of the human body. He is not "interrogating" sexuality, or turning his subjects into metaphors, or forcing them or his viewers to confront anything difficult or weird. The photographs are clear, usually broadly lit, more often than not symmetrical. They are taken with an 8x10 camera, which requires the use of a cloth over the photographer's head, a tripod and individual sheets of film--a format that requires the subject's full collaboration and does not permit any element of ambush or surprise. The subjects quoted in Elizabeth Beverly's introduction to Radiant Identities (Aperture, 95 pp., $40) stress the collaborative nature of Sturges's enterprise:
You're sitting on the beach playing cards with your friends, when you see Jock walking along with his camera. You call him over, and he joins the card game. Maybe while you're all playing, he'll see a picture, and soon you see it too, and so, for a time, instead of playing cards, you take pictures.
Of course, the subject's cooperation is no guarantee of the innocence of the photographer's motives. Wilhelm Pluschow's elaborately staged, turn-of-the-century tableaux of nude Italian peasant boys depicted as so many Ganymedes are as obviously labor-intensive as they are pedophilic; and for that matter Lewis Carroll did not even require his little girls to disrobe for his photographs of them to be sexually charged. Now comes word of Jennifer Montgomery's recent, apparently autobiographical film Art for Teachers of Children, in which a photographer modeled on Sturges deflowers his 14-year-old subject. (I have not seen it.) But it is necessary to acknowledge that there are three separate areas of ambiguity at issue: the artist's behavior, the artist' s motives, the viewer's response.
These matters mostly lie outside the frame. The first of them is a biographical item to which we may never be privy. What do we know of how the Impressionist painters treated their models? If we somehow got proof that a given pose was obtained under threat, it could poison the resulting work for us forever, but in the absence of concrete damaging information we can only judge by what we see. As for the matter of the viewer's response, it is so wide-ranging as to stand outside the bounds of anybody's legislation. There are conceivably humans out there who are aroused by Weegee's and Joel Witkin's cadavers, just as there are probably those who are offended by Andre Kertesz' s and Bill Brandt's abstracted nudes.
A trickier question by far is that of the artist's motives. Between the poles of chaste portraiture and rank exploitation lies a vast gray field. Pluschow's pedophilia is pretty hard to miss, banner-headlined by all his campy classical references, floral garlands and such. But Carroll's is subtler, perhaps expressed in certain poses, certain glances, certain costumes, and how confident would we be about calling it pedophilia without the enhancement of biographical details? (Those of his photographs that were deemed offensive were destroyed after his death.) It is one thing to look at a gauze-filtered David Hamilton fantasy of nubile bodies arrayed among satin cushions, or at that disturbing picture of the prepubescent Brooke Shields standing naked in full makeup in a bathtub, and quite another to look at Jock Sturges' s photographs, which provide no such overt cues to the spectator. His motives are not accessible.
***
Nudist magazines and videos have come under stern assault as pornography, and at worst, as child pornography, during the late 1990s.
While producing child pornography is certainly a crime, it is not clear that photos of naked children at play is porn, and even if it is, if it's consumption leads to sexual offences against children. David Howitt has researched the question deeply, and he writes that the "relationship between pornography, fantasy and offending is unclear… Very little interest in child porn was expressed by most of the paedophiles. Some of the offenders expressed strong distaste for that sort of thing although few had actually seen it.
"In none of the case studies in our research can be found instances of individuals who had experience of pornography of any sort prior to their early sexualisation. There is no evidence that early exposure to porn was a cause of later offending… Whilst some therapists see fantasy as part of an escalating offending cycle…the direct evidence of this is slight."
In his 1998 book Pornocopia, Lawrence O'Toole writes: "There is a dread of the power of the image in Western culture. This dread underlies a lot of discussions of child porn, especially theories of escalation. The escalatory model suggests that a person may come across images of child nudity and might as a consequence develop paedophilic tendencies. This version of events figures human sexuality as deeply unstable, and pornography, particularly child pornography, as a highly toxic substance that can cause people to develop desires they would never have felt otherwise.
"…The call for children to be sexually informed to help protect themselves can conflict with the dominant cultural imaginings of childhood as a period of innocence… Childhood innocence is arguably an adult projection…"
In his General Theory of the Neuroses, Sigmund Freud wrote: "…Adult inclinations to perversion had their roots in childhood, that children have a predisposition to all of them and carry them out to an extent corresponding to their immaturity… No doubt you will feel inclined at first to deny the whole business…overlook the sexual activities of children (no mean achievement)."
Children general ignore conventional distinctions, such as between the masculine and feminine, the oral and the anal, say some sexologists such as American Leonore Tiefer. "As long as the adult members of a society permit them to do so, immature males and females engage in practically every type of sexual behavior found in grown men and women." Says Judith Levine, "Normal is a moral category. We really don't know anything about normal children's sexual behavior."
Adult talk of childhood fills with longing for the things that we gave up to grow up, "our lost potential selves," says Elizabeth Wilson, "our lost 'polymorphous-perverse' sexuality."
Those with traditional
values generally want to limit sexual expression to heterosexual monogamous
marriage. They wish to suppress children's sexuality and all other forms
of sexuality outside of the Biblical ideal.