Beyond The Pale

By BRUCE HANDY

My personal opinion is that the photos do cross the line. But do you want my opinion or the store's?" asks the clerk who picked up the phone at an independent Manhattan bookstore specializing in art and photo books. She is responding to my queries about David Hamilton, the photographer whose recent collection of images of nude young girls, The Age of Innocence, prompted an Alabama grand jury to indict Barnes & Noble on charges of selling child pornography. This action came in response to protests by Christian activists, fanned nationwide by the likes of Randall Terry, the antiabortion activist and conservative talk-show host. It won't surprise you to learn that the opinion of Barnes & Noble, the largest U.S. bookstore chain, is that the photographs don't cross the line and that booksellers must stand up for the public's First Amendment right to buy high-gloss photos of naked teenagers. In a recent editorial, the New York Times agreed. And no doubt it is civil libertarians who, in the wake of publicity over the indictments, have been snapping up The Age of Innocence at $45 a pop and causing it to be virtually sold out in New York City, as I discovered after calling a dozen stores. It is doing well elsewhere too: the British book's American distributor says it is out of stock and has been sent back for a new printing. The public, then, has voted. But me, I'm with the independent bookstore clerk and, just this once, Randall Terry.

Me, a liberal member of the media elite who doesn't have a problem with genuine obscenity when it involves adults. But here I am advocating censorship, I suppose--or let's say voluntary censorship on the part of bookstores--if you take my opinion of Hamilton's work to its logical conclusion. The Age of Innocence is really something, though: page after page of pubescent girls in poses reminiscent of those in a Playboy layout circa 1975. The camera's gaze is solemn, the lens gauzy, the light that of a perpetual late afternoon. Half-formed breasts are bared, fingers are coyly sucked, panties pulled at, genitalia caught artfully winking out of bathing suits. In order to remind us that this is art and not, say, a file on the hard drive of some about-to-be-arrested principal, the photos are captioned with musings on adolescent sexuality from literary folk like Spenser ("Her nipples like young blossomed jessamine"), Dryden ("Young am I and yet unskilled") and, most appallingly, Anne Frank ("Am I only 14? Am I really still a silly little schoolgirl?"). One photo of a pert but defiant-looking young thing is labeled with an uncredited "Ne touchez pas." Another reads, "Not unless--or until--I say so!" Could you possibly not be wincing? I found myself both amused and repelled by The Age of Innocence--it's as campy as it is creepy. But that's no defense.

The problem isn't with taking nude photos of minors per se, nor is it with acknowledging that they are sexual beings. Sally Mann and Jock Sturges are two photographers whose unobjectionable work plies the same waters with, respectively, provocative and banal results (New York Times critic described the typical subject of one of Sturges' photos as "just a J. Crew model with no clothes to sell"). Their work, however, has also been the subject of recent protests, and one of Sturges' books, Radiant Identities, is cited in the Alabama indictment.

This is probably too wishy-washy a point for both First Amendment absolutists and people who leap to the barricades at the sight of a hairless vulva, but I'll offer it anyway: the key difference between Mann and Sturges and Hamilton is that while the first two are merely frank, Hamilton's pictures, in their perfumed phoniness, are intended to be arousing. He freely admits it. "Pornography is a word that's not in my vocabulary. It is erotica. I stand by that," says the photographer, a Brit who published his first book in 1970 and who claims on his Website to be--perhaps, he qualifies it--"the most popular artist the world has ever seen." His models, he explains, are "young girls, not children," and "naturists" to boot. Do they enjoy posing for him? "They do indeed." Any objections, he says on the phone from his home in Paris, "are an Anglo-Saxon hang-up. Latins and Scandinavians don't have a problem with it. But who's to decide? It's all in the eye of the beholder."

That's not really a defense either, but it is the catch in these matters. How to define "lascivious exhibition of the exhibition of the genitals" as federal child-pornography law puts it? I know it when I see it, as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said regarding obscenity, while also offering a neat, inadvertent definition of relativity. Point conceded. It's a slippery slope and all that. But I still have a hard time understanding support for a book that portrays real girls as ripening, imminently deflowerable teases. Doesn't that make them fair game, and isn't that what children are never supposed to be?