A break of silence for the issue of public debate...
Allice Liddell taken by Chales Lutwidge Dogson, better known as Lewis Carroll.
In Australia we have a censorship policy, which is somewhat confounding and ridiculously overly constrictive at times. Over the past years, cinemas were prohibited from showing the film Ken Park given the graphic depiction of a suicide, intercourse involving both homosexual relationships and mixed partners and parental assault - both sexual and violent. Subsequently, the film was not released here on grounds of gratuity and necessity of the sexual content alone - people who saw the film at the protest screening, however, said that it was frank. It wasn't a film that was going to make history books, but it wasn't unnecessary or overly ridiculous. There was also the case around the mid-nineties, a good eight years after the initial controversy, of Serrano's Piss Christ, where the National Gallery of Victoria had to close its Serrano exhibition due to the inclusion of the photograph. The list goes on, through literature, film, art, theatre and music.
In the past week, Bill Henson, a well known and - in most cases - a well respected Australian photographer has been taken through the laundry of Australia's censorship police. The start of this came when a spokeswoman for a child protection group made a formal complaint about an exhibition of Henson's that was scheduled to open on the night of the 22nd of May. Soon after the police seized a few specific photographs from the collection, depicting nudes of a pubescent girl, and a pre-pubescent boy. From here the debate quickly collapsed into whether Bill Henson himself is a paedophile, whether the images are indecent, and whether the censorship has been just or fair.
Henson's work has often centred in on the blurred line between innocence and maturity, androgyny and sexual identity, night and day, the concrete and the abstract, life and death. He often photographs a body or a face in a similar way as most would shoot a landscape, playing with light, colour, shade and texture, bringing out elements most would be unable to see. Images of people have often centralised on contentious issues, whether it be the realities of a child living on the street or, as it is now, the tendencies to bring children into maturity before they're minds fully understand the bigger concepts of 'life'. The images generally offering frank and honest insight into his subject's mind-set without offering a word of explanation and with implicit trust and openness between both photographer and subject.
The Prime Minister has now suggested that the images are 'revolting'. Such a suggestion and the censorship seen on sites such as this, which pre-determine people's judgement on the photographs as 'pornography' through the censorship blocks, make a crude suggestion about the Australian view of the human body, let alone the content of these specific images. What is revolting, is the insinuation that we are so puritan that we cannot view a body for what it is, without having impure and vile thoughts of sex and base lust. Having looked at the images myself, I find them arresting and beautiful, still and full of questions. The images themselves were not on sale to the general public and it is unlikely that without the attention drawn to the exhibition through the controversy generated, that many people would have known about it, almost guaranteeing more people (and perhaps more people with perversions) searching for the images and thinking of them as the 'exploitative photographs of naked children'.
The question of pornography must revolve around intent of production, not on what someone could use an image for, otherwise we will find a never ending cycle of persecuting the wrong people. And, if there is a question as to whether these specific images are sexualised themselves or if they raise issues and debate of the over sexualisation of children, all one needs to do is to look at child pageantry images or to search 'teen sex' in google and then see which of these images exploit the innocence of children and which is open ended discussion grappling with the confusion and the issues flowing out from such exploitation.
It is my contention that if you wish to say that if these images (sexualised or not) must be removed given that they are out in the open for anyone to see, then the actual sexualised images of children in commercial catalogues and modelling agencies must equally be censored. If we cannot trust our police to police the real threats, the real paedophiles and the real dangers, then we should - as PM Rudd suggests - just let children be children and not allow them in any sector, for fear that the one bad egg in a hundred or so will think more of what the image actually is. That is to say, anyone under the age of 18 (in my opinion an extremely arbitrary point of 'maturity') should not be allowed to earn money, should not be allowed to watch television and should not be allowed to enter into political and social debate. This, of course is untenable, but how do you just allow 'children to be children' without cutting all ties from those things that want our children to be more than children? Would it not be more pertinent yet again to allow artwork to operate in an open society that has laws about parental consent and to spend time identifying mannerisms that give away those with mal-intent, so that before they do anything to harm anyone, they would be caught? Why punish all of society for a few sick people's behaviour?
Does the question of all this censorship come down to a denial of what is real, concrete and thought provoking? Do we not want to question the things that are frightening, but that are real and need to be questioned and probed? Do things that make us focus on political and ideological debate ruffle our feathers so badly that we have to have them quashed at all costs? Are we not a robust enough nation to entertain debate and talk, or do we need to be placated night after night with the apex of our artistic achievement - Neighbours and Home and Away?
For those interested in the rest of the exhibition go here.