The debate around Melbourne photographer Bill Henson's latest exhibition has continued as NSW police lay charges over allegedly pornographic images. Police raided Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery on Friday, taking the set of offending images off the walls. With the images censored the now notorious show is set to re-open in coming days.
Clive Hamilton, formerly of the Australian Institute, wrote in Crikey on Friday that the images cannot be seen outside the context of the broader sexualisation of childhood and adolescence by media and advertisers. "The sexualisation of children by the media and the wider culture has occurred only over the last decade or two," Hamilton writes, "yet as a result images of n-ked children can no longer be seen as harmless. It is tragic that those who are responsible for sexualising children have robbed us of the ability to see Bill Henson’s photographs the way he intended. In destroying the sexual innocence of children they have destroyed the innocence of innocence."
Robert Nelson, art critic for The Age, acknowledges the creepiness of the photos in an opinion piece published yesterday. Part of this lays, no doubt, in the power dynamic between young female subject and renowned male photography. But Nelson argues that this is why they should remain on the walls. They challenge something within us - that is their intention, not fodder for paedophilia.
Melbourne's Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt, inevitably, weighs in as the voice of 'common sense' and straight-laced morality. Meanwhile at the site of his sister paper in Sydney, the Daily Telegraph, publishes the photos, sporting black censorship bands in all the places you imagine. Presumably the photographic art they're so put off by is not being used here in the titillating manner they're decrying. Oh no, it's for the sake of public knowledge. So we know what kiddie-fiddling scum we're up against etc etc.
The paedophilia taboo is deep-seated, which is why this seems so fraught and unresolvable. Part of it, no doubt, circulates in what Hamilton identifies as a bigger field of images showing kids and adolescents – particularly female – in increasingly sexualised poses to sell goods. The government reluctance to constrain consumption and businesses forbids too much hand-wringing and (god forbid!) legislation or regulation on advertising. So the artist who dares push the wound a little is parlayed instead. The violence of the reaction seems to carry a lot of history, a lot of unspoken irritation before now. Freud would have a field day right now – not only with the taboo around childhood sexuality but also the obvious displacement that's going on…
(Photo: Adam Hollingworth)