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London art gallery closes over nude child photos
Scotland Yard was alerted after visitors to the exhibition at the Spitz gallery in London complained they considered the images, showing the girl as a baby, a toddler, and a five-year-old, to be pornographic. The doors of the gallery at Spitalfields Market in east London were closed and the windows covered while the gallery took advice from officers. The artist, American Betsy Schneider, was amazed. She said: "The aim of these pictures is not to provoke or to shock. The idea is to show time, change and growth." The case has echoes of the furore in 2001 when police threatened to seize three of American photographer Tierney Gearon's images of her children in the nude from the Saatchi gallery in London. Then the former culture minister, Chris Smith, intervened to chastise officers for overstepping the mark between probity and censorship. Ms Schneider's piece, exhibited in a festival celebrating women's writing, is made up of three large blocks of pictures, each of which shows 63 images of her daughter, Madeleine. One block shows her aged nine weeks; in the second she is 2 years old; in the third, which caused offence, she is aged five. In most of the images she is naked, though in a few she does wear clothes. She is standing up and looking straight into the camera. A followup article clarifies that the gallery's management contacted police on its own. "Their concerns were exacerbated by one visitor who was allegedly spotted taking his own photographs of the work." More about Betsy Schneider and the Spitz gallery. The Sun prints one of Schneider's photos from the Spitz exhibition alongside "a photo from a child porn website" (both with face and genitals masked), which the paper claims "graphically illustrates [that] the difference between art and child pornography is NIL."
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