The Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Paddington Sydney was raided last night by police just hours before the opening of the exhibition by photographer Bill Henson. It appears that this photographer likes to photograph naked kids for the sake of art.
I want you to look at some of his photos that are causing all the ruckus, keeping in mind that they were not censored while displayed in the gallery.
What I find shocking is that some artists claim this as being censorship of the highest degree. Now I consider that comment complete and utter fucking bullshit. I am sorry but as far as I am concerned anybody who takes photos of naked children and places them on the net is nothing more than child pornographer. The fact that he is a well renowned photographer is of no consequence except that it gives him the right to ask for a higher price.
What I find really shocking is that these so called parents allowed their children to be photographed in such a manner. I hope that at the very least they were present at the shoot. I hate to think that they allowed this man to be alone with these poor kids.
I reiterate, as a society we can not stand for so called artists getting away with this. Child porn is child porn no matter who is the photographer and what is the medium. There is absolutely no excuse for these sorts of exhibitions.
That is not art and for anyone to say otherwise is insane.
I’m with you on this one Kat
This is insane! What a bunch of fools! I’m glad they made the management decision to raid the pace before it opened!
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It’s not over yet. They may decide it’s OK an re-open. Hopefully not.
Well, since these children are not engaged in a sexual act, and at least based on the photos I saw are not overtly sexually explicit, I must conclude that they do not qualify as porn, and are probably not abusive in nature, just entirely and ridiculously creepy.
On the other hand, I don’t know that they are signifciantly more creepy that Anne Geddes’s Naked baby photos, and no one ever accuses her of pedophelia, so the question I would ask is how old does a child have to be before a photo of them naked automatically becomes porn, and how much older than that do they have to be before it’s once again just a nakes photo?
Don’t get me wrong, I find his pictures creepy, but I can’t say that they should be criminalized, we already have seen enough cases of parents because some moron in the wal-mart photo lab reports them for having taken pictures of their kids the the bathtub.
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These apparently were only a sample of the photos, but what we must remember is the interest of the children and whether or not we as a society are over sexualising them. Tale for example a pedophile who was convicted for having photos of kids on his computer (not necessarily in a sexual act) does it make it OK for Henson’s to be accepted just because he is well known and can put a $25,000 price tag on it.
If we let this one slip through, then what is next?