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Pornography.
The American legal system defines porn as 'lacking no artistic merit and causing sexual thoughts', or as "creative activity (writing or pictures or films etc.) of no literary or artistic value other than to stimulate sexual desire". So that's Britney Spears out then. Anyway, the British define porn under the Obscene Publications Act as;

For the purposes of this Act an article shall be deemed to be obscene if its effect or (where the article comprises two or more distinct items) the effect of any one of its items is, if taken as a whole, such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it.

Clear?

Some images by Betsy Schneider....

Since her birth on December 14 1997 I have made two photographs of my daughter Madeleine every day. When my son Viktor was born in January of 2002, I expanded the project to include him. Each day I make a full length vertical image of each child and a horizontal shot of their face. The body-shots of my daughter have been composited into 63 day/9week blocks.

The idea for this project came to me in two days before Madeleine was due to be born. I came to it wanting to keep a record, wanting to hold on. The meaning has changed in many ways over the past five years. Like the children themselves this work has a will and a life of its own. Initially I wanted to do it for a year. More than five years later it remains an integral part of our lives, the first (sometimes the only) thing we do together each day. I decided that the body-shot would be unclothed for what seemed to me to be quite obvious reasons: I wanted to show how the body changes over time, I also wanted to record the incidental changes which happen day to day: their cuts and bruises, dirt, drawings on themselves, temporary tattoos, tans and sunburns. With clothes on, the work would have been more about what they wore each day, I am more interested in what their bodies look like each day. The work is very much about the child’s body: the way it grows and absorbs life as well as the way the child’s relationship to his/her body changes over time.

These have been exhibited in liberal London, in the year 2004.
The response?
Police were called to a fashionable art gallery last night when concerns were raised over an exhibition featuring photos of an artist's naked daughter.
Scotland Yard was alerted after visitors to the exhibition at the Spitz gallery in London complained they considered the images, showing the girl as a baby, a toddler, and a five-year-old, to be pornographic.

Now I don't think Betsy's work is particularly interesting. What is interesting is the response, which, I think, speaks huge leather-bound volumes about the people making the complaints.

I think any children the complainants have should be taken into care immediately, as their parents obviously think a naked 5-year old is pornographic.

The crime here is not pornography. It's knee-jerk, irrational, emotionally crippled, politically correct (oxymoron alert), blind censorship. By the people of the people. The proles are thought-policing themselves! Big Brother will be happy.

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