giblet wrote: Don't know if this has been mentioned already, but Sally Mann is a famous photographer who has been widely criticized for taking (and publishing) photographs of her unclothed children. She was never charged with a crime, but many wanted her to be. It was an interesting controversy.

... Self-censoring should never have to enter into an artist's or a curator's thinking, according to Edward de Grazia, a professor at Benjamin Cardoza School of Law in New York and the author of "Girls Lean Back Everywhere," a history of efforts to suppress literary and artistic expression in the United States. For a year, he has urged Mann to let him file a case that would challenge the Federal child pornography laws. He has fought in court to protect the works of Henry Miller and William Burroughs against charges of obscenity, and he feels that Mann's photographs deserve the same guarantees under the First Amendment.

"The child pornography laws, especially the Federal laws, are very dangerous for artists like Sally," he says. "She's working under an inchoate threat. Any Federal prosecutor anywhere in the country could bring a case against her in Virginia and not only seize her photos, her equipment, her Rolodexes, but also seize her children for psychiatric and physical examination. No artist should have to live under that kind of a threat."

Laws vary from state to state regarding such issues as exposure of a young girl's breasts in a photograph. But Federal laws, and those of many states, prohibit the "lascivious" exhibition of the genitals of a child under the age of 18. In many instances, a violation of the law can be a serious felony.

During a show of Mann's photographs last year at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Rev. Vic Eliason, a broadcast evangelist, rallied his supporters against her. "He got the police and the D.A. to come down and investigate the show," she says. "It was scary because he talked about saving my children from me. It fizzled out. But it's the kind of thing that I'm afraid of."

De Grazia says: "What makes Sally such a good case is that right now her work deals squarely with this taboo subject of nude children. There isn't the slightest question that what she's doing is art, so her motives and the artistic value would be unmistakable to the Supreme Court. Her work would highlight the vagueness and overbreadth of the child pornography laws. Isn't work like this entitled to be protected under the First Amendment?" ...

Negative criticism of Mann's works is not hard to find. One man, Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, was against Mann’s photographs. He believes that parents should do everything in their power to protect, shelter, and nurture their children. He says that “selling photographs of children in their nakedness for profit is an exploitation of the parental role and I think it’s wrong.”[12] Another negative criticism was found in Raymond Sokolov’s article Critique: Censoring Virginia[13] in the Wall Street Journal. He talked about whether federal money should be given to the arts and whether or not children should be photographed nude. In the article, he used an image of Virginia (Virginia at 4) to illustrate it and he covered her eyes, nipples, and pubic region with black bars. Mann said he used the image without permission “to illustrate that this is the kind of thing that shouldn’t be shown.”[12] Mann was devastated and insulted that someone could mutilate her photograph like that. Virginia was also upset about the article. She wrote a letter to the author saying “Dear Sir, I don’t like the way you crossed me out.” Mann said that after Virginia saw the article, she started touching herself on the areas that were blacked out, saying, “what’s wrong with me?”

Dr. Aaron Esman, a child psychiatrist at the Payne Whitney Clinic believes that Mann is serious about her work and that she has “no intention to jeopardize her children or use them for pornographic images.”[12] He says that the nude photographs don’t appear to be erotically stimulating to anyone but a “case-hardened pedophile or a rather dogmatic religious fundamentalist.”[12]

Joon wrote:I have shared my thoughts in a spin-off thread I created in the Ladies Only section. Those who have access there are free to go read there and discuss and share their feedback over there: http://www.cambodiaexpatsonline.com/vie ... =28&t=1989

Joon wrote:I have shared my thoughts in a spin-off thread I created in the Ladies Only section. Those who have access there are free to go read there and discuss and share their feedback over there: http://www.cambodiaexpatsonline.com/vie ... =28&t=1989

Joon wrote:Sorry Richard, I may be too paranoid, but I felt safer sharing my thoughts in that section.

You are free to request access to Gmack or OD, I personally don't have objection to it.

phuketrichard wrote:personally i find photos of dead bodies in some Cambodian an Thai newspapers an what some locals post of their facebook pages much more
pornographic than innocent photos of kids being kids
or what the Catholic church has done for ages

if u see pornography in any photos of kids who just happen to be naked, its you that has a problem and i feel sorry for ur upbringing.