A moral panic over the production of child pornography has swept the United States in the past several years. Recent episodes of "Geraldo" and "Gabriel's Fire" dealing with child pornography are the latest in a spate of drama and junk news shows that feed the popular perception that child porn is a widespread problem. The very term "child pornography" is so volatile that it deflects any serious examination of the issues it raises, such as what constitutes child porn and who is harmed by it. Legislators and media commentators are reluctant to criticize the furor over child pornography for fear of being seen as child porn "advocates." Thus an increasing number of artists, exhibition spaces, and parent photographers around the country are getting arrested, censored and harassed for producing, exhibiting or possessing child pornography when what they are actually "guilty" of is making and displaying images that depict kids who do not have clothes on.Things have since gone from bad to worse. Pro-censorship activists from the theocratic right and politically correct left, united in the belief that some ideas are so dangerous that they must be suppressed, have seriously crippled the First Amendment by inflaming child-pornography hysteria.
We're all familiar with the plight of Toni Marie Angeli, a Cambridge mother who took an introductory photography class at Harvard Extension School. Angeli shot some innocent film of her son Nico and took it to Zona Photographic Labs. Employees freaked at the sight of a four-year-old's bare butt, and called the cops. Angeli was not docile when police accused her of being a pornographer and child abuser and threatened to take her son away from her. For standing up for her rights, Angeli was punished with a month in prison and has been subjected to malicious personal attacks.
Angeli's case is far from unique. In 1988, for example, Virginia photographer Alice Sims' two children were temporarily removed from her home and given medical examinations after Dart Drug photo developers alerted police to pictures of a naked infant and a naked 3-year-old Sims had shot for a collage series called "Water Babies. In 1989, Patti Ambrogi, a teacher at Rochester Institute of Technology, was targeted with four complaints of child abuse and pornography when she exhibited photos of her nude twin daughters at a campus gallery. Also in 1989, FBI agents raided internationally acclaimed photographer, Jock Sturges, seizing equipment, prints, and negatives. Sturges photographs nudist families, primarily in France. No charges were ever filed, but his legal bill ran to $100,000 and much work was destroyed. The US government spent 2 million dollars in its investigation.
In 1994, police raided an art gallery in Tucson and seized innocuous photographs of Robyn Stoutenburg's four-year old son. Marilyn Zimmerman, art professor at Indiana's Wayne State University, was the target of a search and seizure operation after a janitor discovered a discarded proof sheet of Zimmerman's three-year old daughter and turned it in to the police. And another photography student, Eljat Feurer of Bernardsville, New Jersey, was arrested and forced to live away from home for a year when he took nude photos of his six-year old daughter for a course at the International Center for Photography in New York City.
From time to time, entire cultures go insane. People become overwhelmed by problems that seem beyond comprehension or solution. At such times, we need evil to take palpable form. Some powerless group is scapegoated and the powers-that-be focus our rage upon them. In the 1950s, the target in the US was domestic communists and other subversives. In Germany during the 30s, it was the Jews. And in 17th century Salem, and in Europe for centuries before that, it was heretics and witches.
The current moral panic--the New McCarthyism--is a reaction against the 60s, against the rise of gay liberation during the 70s, and against the tragic AIDS epidemic. Nearly twenty years ago, Anita Bryant started her campaign against sexual minorities. Not surprisingly, her cry was "Save the Children." Bryant's campaign has evolved, but it has never abated. And the often unacknowledged bogeyman is still the queer male, feared as an unfeeling, insatiable predator upon children.
A hallmark of moral panics is the officially promoted belief that the monsters are so cunning that experts are needed to identify and destroy them. Citizens are told to be vigilant, to spy on friends, neighbors, and family members. We are urged to "err on the side of caution" and to report suspicious characters. One cannot have a police state without the police, and one cannot have authoritarianism without authorities. Only an authority can decide if your left-leaning Uncle Fred is really a Communist. Only an authority can decide whether the family next door might be hiding Jews in their attic. Only an authority can decide if that eccentric old woman who lives by herself is a witch. And only an authority can decide if a mother who takes nude photographs of her own child is a pornographer and abuser.
In fifteenth century Europe, the greatest heresy was not to believe in witchcraft. Today the greatest heresy is to doubt the universality of childhood sexual abuse or the existence of a vast international child-pornography industry. But heresy is an artist's moral duty. There is a mantra that I think all artists should repeat to themselves upon arising: The government is not my friend, the government is not my friend... An artist in bondage to state, to church, to a therapy cult, to the mass media, or to any other "authority" produces propaganda, not art.
As Laura Marks attested, America is now an insane and scary place. And the scariest child abusers of all are those well-meaning vigilantes who spread ignorance and fear, thus robbing the coming generation of its precious birthright of freedom.