Photography Collection

By Kathy Marks

In itself, the picture is simple. It shows a girl of six in a demure pose, sitting on a rock with white cliffs in the background. Its impact comes from the fact she is naked and the photograph is on the cover of Australia's leading arts journal. According to the editor of Art Monthly, its latest cover is an effort to "restore dignity" to the discourse about the artistic portrayal of children. To its critics, including the Australin Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, it is "disgusting". What it has achieved is to bring to the boil a simmering row over the difference between art and pornography in a country with a long tradition of censorship. The debate has been close to exploding since police swooped on a Sydney gallery in May and seized photographs of naked adolescent girls taken by the acclaimed artist Bill Henson. Police quietly abandoned their inquiry a couple of weeks later, having found nothing to justify charges against Henson or the gallery, and the pictures were put back on display. Art Monthly's cover, published this month with two further photographs of the six-year-old inside, was clearly designed to provoke. It has succeeded, bringing calls for the magazine's public funding to be withdrawn and for new protocols on the portrayal of children in art. While supporters of artistic freedom defended Art Monthly's right to publish, child protection campaigners were affronted and Mr Rudd, referring to such images, said: "I can't stand that stuff... We are talking about the innocence of little children here. A little child cannot answer for themselves about whether they wish to be depicted in this way."

But the controversy was complicated by the intervention of two unexpected players. One was Olympia Nelson, the girl in the photo, which was taken five years ago by her mother, Polixeni Papapetrou. The other was Mr Henson – or, at least, "a source close to him". Olympia, now 11, said: "I was really, really offended by what Kevin Rudd said about this picture. It is one of my favourites – if not my favourite – photo my mum has ever taken of me." However, Henson's associate said the artist thought the choice of cover image displayed "a lack of judgement only serving to drive deeper divisions in the community". That comment may say more about Henson's fears of being charged and pilloried as a child pornographer than about his genuine views. Nevertheless, it was grist to the mill of Hetty Johnston, a child protection activist, who said: "When [art and pornography] collide, we have to err with the children. We need to put a line in the sand – because clearly some of those in the arts world can't – and say this is a no-go zone." But just where that line should be drawn is as unclear as ever. Liberals argue that it all hinges on context and intent – if an artist has no intention of titillating, a work is not pornographic. And there is a difference between posting nude pictures of children online and displaying them in a gallery.

But for Ms Johnston and like-minded people, all nude images of children are sexual and should be banned. To them, Olympia's protestations are irrelevant. She could not have consented to being photographed at six and, at 11, is still not mature enough to pronounce on the rights and wrongs. Once again, the matter looks likely to end up in the hands of police, thanks to the Opposition leader Brendan Nelson, who has asked officers to investigate. He said: "These people with Art Monthly have sought to... send a two-fingered salute to the rest of the country about the controversy surrounding Bill Henson's photography. I think it is time for us to take a stand." This is, of course, an age-old debate and one not confined to Australia. It has a long history of censorship, and those old enough to remember books banned in the Forties, Fifties and Sixties could be forgiven a shiver of déjà vu. They included James Joyce's Ulysses, James Baldwin's Another Country, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Norman Mailer's The Naked And The Dead and, naturally, D H Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.

The visual arts, too, have come under scrutiny. In 1982, police raided the Sydney gallery of Roslyn Oxley, where Henson's show was to be held, and removed works by a Chilean-born Australian, Juan Davila. His graphic sexual images were said to offend public morals. But the then state premier, Neville Wran, rather more cool-headed than his contemporary counterparts, intervened and the works were reinstated. Police may well scratch their heads about Olympia's photo. Some observers say that only in a climate of moral hysteria could the image be deemed sexually provocative. Martyn Jolly, head of photography at the Australian National University, defended Art Monthly, saying: "If you are editor of a magazine which is meant to be reporting on Australia on a month-to-month basis, and this has been the biggest thing in Australian art for a long time, you would be [neglecting] your duty if you didn't actually discuss the debate. "We aren't going to let politicians, who are always wanting to jump on populist bandwagons, dictate what we can and can't show." The Australia Council, which funds Art Monthly, defended the magazine, saying: "For many years our society has managed to differentiate between artistic creativity and the totally unacceptable sexual exploitation of children."

Artists who shocked with child images

Marcus Harvey

Harvey's portrait of the Moors murderer Myra Hindley, created from a collage of hundreds of copies of children's hand-prints, caused outrage at the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in December 1997. Winnie Johnson, the mother of one of her victims, pleaded for the picture to be excluded. Hindley herself sent a letter from jail requesting thather portrait be removed, out of respect for the victims' families. Despite protests, the portrait remained, until protesters daubedit with eggs and ink.

Tierney Gearon

The American photographer became the centre of controversy in 2001 following complaints from the public over an exhibition at the Saatchi gallery in London. Police warned that Gearon's works, which showed her children naked, could be seized under indecency laws. There were calls from the tabloids for the exhibition to be closed. But the artist received the backing of Chris Smith, who was Culture Secretary at the time. Mr Smith condemned the police for censoring artistic freedom.

Betsy Schneider

The American photo-artist's exhibition, Inventories, found itself in a storm after opening at the Spitz Gallery in east London in 2004. The show consisted of pictures of Schneider's daughter naked taken at intervals from infancy to five years old. Hours after the show opened, it was closed amid complaints that it was pornographic. Members of the public had been seen taking their own photographs of the exhibition.

Perhaps categories of photography exist not only because of context or subject but because of the need for definitions within a medium that has been widely employed by amateurs, technicians and professionals in many fields. Bourdieu sees that problems of definition in photography place it outside the cultural hierarchy. The "uneducated" consumer ­ his phrase ­ feels able to view and judge photographs without having to acquire the kind of specialist knowledge necessary for mainstream art. His view that photography falls outside the "consecrated arts" does not prevent those inside attempting to appropriate and/or marginalise it. Fashion photography falls between art and commerce. Donovan, Klein and Tillmans have worked in the fashion business. Donovan, although his work was not confined to fashion, worked in the commercial world. Klein and Tillmans have moved between the commercial and art worlds. Klein's preoccupation in the 1950s with intervention ­ in relation to his subjects and during processing ­ can be seen in his fashion and street photos. He got into the action and later, during processing, bleached and cropped his images for a highly contrasted, grainy effect. That he was influenced by documentary photo and cinéma vérité is clear, but, in the fashion shots, vérité has given way to cinema. He actually acknowledged being influenced by Cecil Beaton.

Even the greatest and most original of photographers must respond to the commercial imperative. Klein's extremely and obviously contrived fashion photos have a formality that is not seen in Tillmans' images. Tillmans, like Klein, has done a lot of fashion work and, according to Russell Ferguson, "all of his various types of photos can be shown together producing an over-archingly structural view of urban life. He has been working through the past decade at the same time as certain fashion photographers have aimed at a particular realism that reflects aspects of urban life." Corinne Day's photographs of Kate Moss caused a sensation in the 1990s ­ they were too realistic, even though carefully staged and no more "real" than Mike Leigh's films.

The acceptance of photography as part of the art world took place in the 1960s and, since then, it has come to displace painting. As a result, artists such as Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall can now bring narrative into fine art photography. Their styles are very different: Jeff Wall building a kind of realism and Cindy Sherman working within a fantasy world. We can see both approaches mirrored in contemporary fashion photography. So I seem to be coming down on the side of fashion not being separate from mainstream photography; how can it be otherwise when Tillmans won the Turner Prize last year? Fashion may be regarded as a category of photography, but it has had a symbiotic relationship with art photography, both through its practitioners and as a reflection of movements and styles.

A set of four portraits from the Tobey Beach series, showing Monroe with long, curly tresses and her trademark winning smile, is estimated to sell for $7,000 to $9,000. "She is one of the most iconic figures in the history of American culture of the past 100 years," said Josh Holdeman, head of Christie's 20th century art. Among other highlights is a group of photos known as the "Last Sitting" and taken by Stern for Vogue in 1962, just weeks before Monroe's death at 36. The eight-page feature was shot during three long sessions at the Hotel Bel-Air in Beverly Hills. As the issue was going to press, Vogue learned that the actress had died. An emergency meeting was called and it was decided that the photo layout should run just as planned — as a memorial tribute to Monroe. Fifty-nine key images from the shoot — including an uncharacteristically forlorn-looking Monroe in a black dress that conceals her body — are estimated to bring $100,000 to $150,000. A 1957 portrait of a crestfallen-looking Monroe in black halter dress — in which photographer Richard Avedon turned "the subject from a star into a mere mortal" — is estimated to fetch the sale's highest price for a single photo, up to $35,000, Christie's said.

Andre de Dienes, Marilyn Monroe, Tobey Beach - Long Islan, 1949, silvergelatin print, 32,9 x 27,8 cm

Avedon "banished every trace of the erotic charm and effervescence for which the actress was celebrated. ... Behind the beautiful face, her spirits sag as gravely as the body beneath the sequined dress," the auction house said. Christie's said the sale represents the largest collection of Monroe photos to come on the market. Many of the images were featured in the "I Wanna Be Loved By You" Monroe exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2004. New York collectors Leon and Michaela Constantiner are selling the photos plus 250 other images representing fashion, glamour and celebrities by such art-world stars as Andy Warhol, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn and Robert Mapplethrope. The collection also has an unusually large number of sexually explicit prints as well as nude photos of actors and models such as Kate Moss, Patti Hansen, Charlotte Rampling and Nastassja Kinski. Buyers from around the world have expressed interest in the Constantiner collection, one of the largest of its kind, said Holdeman. "For them to have embarked on a journey far before it became in the public eye critically important, it's incredibly prescient and ambitious," Holdeman said. (AP)