Critic's Notebook: Arresting Images of Innocence (or Perhaps Guilt)
By SARAH BOXER
The people who need defending on principle are not always the ones you would
actually want to defend. They may not be the worthiest people or the nicest or
the wittiest. Often they are mediocre or gross or self-aggrandizing. Think of
Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler. Or Karen Finley, the performance artist
best known for smearing her body with chocolate. Just because they are under
siege legally doesn't mean they are worth the trouble of defending on other
grounds.
Consider two photographers who have recently been called child
pornographers. There is David Hamilton, whose book "Age of Innocence" (Arum
Press) is full of simpering, soft-focus pictures of naked girls with budding
breasts, paired with quotations about their forthcoming deflowering.
And there is Jock Sturges, who posed nude, blond, teen-age girls and boys in
"Radiant Identities" and "The Last Days of Summer" (Aperture). After Sturges'
studio was raided seven years ago by federal agents, a grand jury declined to
indict him on charges of child pornography. He's back.
Hamilton and Sturges are on the public's mind these days thanks to Randall
Terry, the conservative radio talk-show host and founder of the anti-abortion
group Operation Rescue, who prodded his followers to locate prosecutors
interested in pressing a case against Barnes & Noble for selling books by
Hamilton and Sturges. The plan worked.
Last month, an Alabama grand jury indicted the company on 32 charges of
child pornography for selling "obscene material containing visual reproduction
of persons under 17 years of age involved in obscene acts." Three months
earlier, a Tennessee grand jury indicted Barnes & Noble on similar charges for
displaying the two men's books without their plastic wrapping on shelves low
enough for children to reach.
In a related incident, the British police have seized one of Robert
Mapplethorpe's books, which contains pictures of bondage and sadism, from the
library of the University of Central England, in Birmingham. Calling it
obscene, the police said they wanted to destroy the book, which survived an
obscenity trial in Cincinnati 10 years ago.
This is great advertising for Hamilton and Sturges. Without the indictments,
there wouldn't be much cause for writing about them now or much reason,
esthetic or moral, for defending them. These two men are legal footnotes. That
doesn't make them wonderful photographers.
You wouldn't know it from the shelves at Barnes & Noble. Last week, only
days after the Alabama action was announced, the chain's store at Astor Place
in the East Village neighborhood in Manhattan was out of both Sturges'
"Radiant Identities" and Hamilton's "Age of Innocence." The store had one
well-thumbed copy of Sturges' "Last Days of Summer." There were a few golf
books by another David Hamilton, however. The shelves were disheveled. A clerk
suggested that there might be some copies of Sturges' and Hamilton's books on
the tables of the men who regularly steal books from Barnes & Noble and sell
them on the street.
The next stop was the bookstore at the International Center of Photography,
on West 43d Street in Manhattan. There was "Radiant Identities" in a plastic
wrapper. Finding Hamilton was still a problem, though. Three more bookstores
were sold out. Finally a Barnes & Noble in the Chelsea neighborhood had two
copies, both wrapped. (By the way, the plastic serves two purposes: It stops
the prying eyes of curious children and keeps the potential purchaser from
discovering what trash it is.)
"The Age of Innocence" is the essence of icky. The author could certainly be
considered a dirty old man. (He has a Web site offering peeks of pubescent
bodies under the headings "Fantasies of Girls" and "Dreams of a Young Girl,"
and he has made soft-core flicks with titles like "First Desires" and "Tender
Cousins.") "The Age of Innocence" is full of photographs of girls in bed,
looking dreamy and spent, with their fingers in their mouths or in their
underpants. All look willing, and almost all have exactly the same small
breasts.
In the final pages of the book, Hamilton writes, fantasizing: "In her
daydreams she thinks about this man who will one day come to her in answer to
her questions. Perhaps he is a prince, a knight on a white stallion, a man in
military uniform. ... She is lovely, our nymph, and her potential is infinite.
Heaven grant her the man who is worthy of her, and who comes to her bringing
sex with tenderness. She has her virginity and her innocence; she will, if she
is fortunate, trade them in due course for experience and love."
The words are accompanied by pictures of a teen-age girl being carried
around by a teen-age boy, who, on the final page, is bending over her.
Sturges is not nearly as nauseating. In fact, museums and galleries seem to
like him. Many of his models are "naturists," nudists he knows in France. All
of them, Sturges says, have given their consent, and most of them happen to be
blond-haired, blue-eyed girls with small breasts.
He likes to photograph them sprawling on towels with sand stuck to their
bottoms, or showering together. Some look straight at the photographer, and
some shut their eyes. They are ornaments for the beach and the blanket.
His photographs, though often vacant, invite gushing interpretation. In the
introduction to "Radiant Identities," the photography critic A.D. Coleman
argues that Sturges' photographs of bodies "poised on the cusp of change" are
"metaphors of metamorphosis."
In "The Last Days of Summer," Jayne Anne Phillips writes about one of
Sturges' subjects, a nude girl lying across the couch: "she is an image of
Christ, of crucifixion, of conscious sacrifice and sorrow ... a child offered
up as Christ was offered."
Then again, maybe she is just a J. Crew model with no clothes to sell.
Not all photographers of exposed children have wasted their time on such
bland shots. Sally Mann, the author of "Immediate Family," is known for
photographing her own children with insect bites on their arms and Popsicle
juice running over their genitals. Mann took a picture of her youngest child,
Virginia, sleeping on a wet spot on the mattress. It's slyly disturbing, but
hardly titillating.
Lewis Carroll photographed lots of rakish and waifish children with their
clothes memorably ripped and a look of defiance on their faces. Despite his
trespasses, the children appear to have some existence beyond his fantasy. The
pictures are intriguing and complex, the kind you might actually want to
defend.
Someone should defend Sturges and Hamilton legally. Esthetically, they're on
their own.
Wednesday, March 4, 1998
Copyright 1998 The New York Times