Saatchi Gallery And UK Police Fight Over Naked Kid Photos

When is art art and when is it pornography?

These days, the UK police have their hands full trying to figure it all out. Following the recent Scotland Yard visit to Christie's over the inclusion of Andres Serrano's sexual photos in an auction (PDNewswire 02.28.01), the police are butting heads with London's Saatchi Gallery.

Its "I am a Camera" photography exhibition drew some complaints over images of naked children by Tierney Gearon and Nan Goldin. Scotland Yard's obscene publications unit was once again dispatched to the show in early March. They warned curator Jenny Blyth that the photographs might contravene the Child Protection Act and that officers may return to seize the pictures unless they were removed by March 15. The gallery was also told to stop sales of the exhibition book.

During the standoff, several newspapers, including the conservative Daily Telegraph, came out in support of the pictures. After two days, amid enormous media attention, the March 15 deadline came and went, and police decided that no offences had been committed.

One of Gearon's pictures shows her naked children on a beach wearing masks, while the other depicts her son urinating in the snow on a skiing holiday. She explains that she documents her children because they are a huge part of her life. "If they had actually taken the pictures down, I would have doubted my moral judgement as a human being and thought that maybe I had done something wrong when I knew that I hadn't," Gearon says. "If someone thought my pictures were pornographic and obscene, it would have poisoned my work, and my work is very wholesome and innocent."

Curator Blyth says: "[The pictures] are not indecent and very few people perceived them in that way. It would take a perverted mind to see these works as indecent or sexually provocative."

-- Terry Hope