Bill Henson Vindicated
The obscenity investigation into Bill Henson's photos of naked 13-year-olds - photos confiscated from the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney - has been dropped. Today the New South Wales Police admitted that the director of public prosecutions saw no reasonable prospect of a successful prosecution. Sense has prevailed, but Aussie PM Kevin Rudd refuses to retract the label "revolting" he applied to the photos. If he had any decency he would apologize to the teenagers involved. And their parents. Look at this photo which sensitively captures a quiet moment of intimacy between two young people. Obscene? Revolting? No way. Aussies, you've elected a clueless and insensitive Philistine. So what else is new? We do it in the UK all the time!
posted by Unknown @ 6.6.08
15 comments
15 Comments:
Just in case anyone missed it the first time round!
Own up, Bill.
The cops are waiting for Henson at an airport somewhere, ya know, a place, that has properly criminalized child pornography.
He'll find out when he gets there. Henson has few friends left in the USA & Europe. He is a mucky pup.
So far I haven't seen one of his photos that is pornographic. His dim lighting disguises the fact that his teenaged subjects are wearing briefs or other garments. Look closely at the one I posted here. The male is wearing briefs and the girl some sort of top. It's all suggestion, black clothing and discreet lighting. So I think the Aussie director of public prosecutions got it right and the police got it wrong. From what I've seen, the outcry against him is hysteria, people jumping on the bandwagon without having seen the photos. If you find a Henson photo that is genuine porn, please send me a link, so I can see the proof for myself. Until then, he's innocent.
"Bill Henson's full-frontal nudes kept out the back
NEWS.com.au, Australia - 6 Jun 2008
By Kara Lawrence and Michelle Cazzulino FULL-frontal photos by Bill Henson of a 12-year-old boy displaying his genitalia were kept from public display by a ..."
Yea, like the magic boy-kids genitalia, our Bill is like kinda low-key, which is why he's limited to hangin with his homies because interpol has da dude blasted.
"If you find a Henson photo that is genuine porn, please send me a link, so I can see the proof for myself. Until then, he's"
Why should anybody circulate child pornography to help you out? Bill Henson has no friends left in the USA or UK, the police there, are wise to him. His geography has been reduced to little more than a webcam. Other countries have child pornography laws that work.
I wasn't asking to be helped out. It was a polite challenge. His work that I've seen isn't pornographic and I don't believe you'll find one of his photos that is.
Nudity by itself isn't porn. Artists have been painting nudes for centuries.
I repeat, nudity by itself isn't porn, even if it does show a 12-year-old boy. Amazonian Indian boys run around in the nude, and documentaries about tribal life show this simple fact. UK TV broadcasts such documentaries and nobody accuse the film-makers or the TV companies of porn.
The galleries are celebrating Bill's link to global pedophilia, he is an icon, and I don't see him asking them to go easy.
Bill Henson's work has been classified as child pornography elsewhere,
the credibility of the Australian authorities in the classification department is not something that is widely regarded.
'Topless teen OK, board says | NEWS.com.au18 May 2008 ... Topless teen OK, board says. By Jonathon Moran and Catherine Caines ... In the foreground are four bottles of Moet & Chandon champagne. ...
www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23713504-2,00.html - Similar pages - Note this'
Your country is a joke. The two naked youths in a bath surrounded by empty bottles of Moet shampoo, booze, nudity, underage on both counts, commercially filmed and it got off with less than a 'G'
it was ignored, that's child pornography, it just is, as a de jure thing all over the world.
Bill does child porn, it is not a secret, he just has immunity on his home turf.
Wouldn't you say the latest exhibition was barely subliminal pro-pedophile messaging to the cognescenti?
http://www.georgepetelingallery.com.au/
"Bill Henson eat your heart out! The girls in Bob Mercer’s pictures are certainly under age. And they are sexy. But who is responsible for this sexiness? Why haven’t the police arrested them? For a limited time you can see Bill Henson’s Untitled (Image 18) from his 1985-86 series alongside Bob’s Un-Real photographs at George Petelin Gallery and judge for yourself.
Un-Real,
New Photography by Robert Mercer"
I don't delve into paedophile websites, so I'll have to take your word that they're celebrating Henson's photos. I will check out the links you've sent me.
I must admit the booze concerns me more than the nudity. We have a huge under-age drinking problem in the UK and women in their mid 20's are now presenting with liver damage!
I'm used to nudity in art, from putti to old men. Look at these neoclassical statues of naked boys:
Carpeaux - Boy with a Shell
Falguiere - The Winner of the Cockfight
Rude - Cosmopolitan Fisherboy (1831)
They are superb works of art; but, as they show boys' genitals, in your book they're porn! No way.
I recall a comment on a previous scandal: a paedophile will probably get turned on looking at the Mothercare catalogue!
How do Henson's "victims" feel about this? I understand the Aussie police interviewed the 13-year-year-old girl at the centre of this controversy, which was the right thing to do. The protestors have ignored her feelings.
As for laws against porn, the USA is the world leader in porn. US porn queens are feted like film stars. They have their own fan clubs and websites and earn big money. So they're supposed to be over 18. How many actually are?
"I must admit the booze concerns me more than the nudity. We have a huge under-age drinking problem in the UK and women in their mid 20's are now presenting with liver damage!"
It is mostly teachers there, they produce disproportioate levels of the child pornography, and from a transaction point of view, it is a national hobby.
They're awash in a sea of alcohol, that is for sure. It is a difficult jurisdiction, they trade-off the Iraq/Afghanistan issue for a free pass in relation to CP.
The FBI can't get feedback on FBI data, the CEOP (SOCA sub-agency) are not allowed to keep it.
So what you see in the newspapers about the Oz cops, CEOP, RCMP, FBI, that frequently is it firing on one piston, everybody has somebody who needs a free pass.
That's one of the reasons the Henson thing is important, if we can't nail that down, we have to give up.
It is simply a waste of time trying to keep track of who is doable and who isn't.
If you look at the pro-porn lobbyig by Hnson's friends, they're basicaly the PR industry for prostitution and pornography in Oz, you'll see they're hammering away at the FBI.
That's their real prize. henson is only background noise to their real objective.
Basically the pro-FBI end are holding our positions like the confederates at the Battle of Five Forks, when it goes, it will be game over, no claw-back, it will simply be over.
"lison Croggon said...
Those who want to know how paedophiles and child porn networks actually operate (and what child porn actually is) should check out this New Matilda article.
They certainly don't exhibit their work in public art galleries. And despite the many claims to the contrary, no artist is involved in making what the police correctly call "child abuse material". And if they were, they would be subject to the law, like anyone else."
http://www.newmatilda.com/2008/06/06/pursuit-innocents
That article is complete drivel, the teaching profesions in Australia, Canada, UK, USA, and New Zealand would be close to the global total that article has for everything.
"he first point he made was that police don't like to use the term "child pornography" - they prefer the term "child abuse material". He went on to say that child abuse material is not part of commercial pornography distribution on the internet."
That's crap, biggest op ever was adult porn sites selling child material (Avalanche), there is only one porn industy east of the Oder Neisse line.
'o give another example of the scale of the problem, in 2004 the biggest police operation ever mounted in Australia to target consumers of child pornography netted 194 men out of a population of 20 million. '
So that Opration Centurion thing hit on ten times that number in a little nok on the net in Croatia? Our position is that the Croatian issue is less than one percent of Oz pedophiles.
Kath Albury, Catharine Lumby and Alan McKee are all out to lunch, they're off the rails and are determined not to be serious about numbers.
The term CP and the dislike of it, was proposed by pornographers to CEOP and the IWF, who accepted it, despite te fact that the UN and e;ected govts have legislated the term into legal being.
It' the porn industry in the driving seat. They helped with the Henson campaign from the beginning to the end.
Gregory
Calm down, Aziz. You're throwing wild accusations in all directions and I have to be careful not to publish anything that might be libellous.
And you missed out the Internet Service Providers who have been turning a blind eye to child porn and claiming it's nothing to do with them. Good news today: three of the top ISP's in the USA - Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable - have finally agreed to block bulletin boards and websites that carry images of child sexual abuse (BBC News). About time!
I believe the authorities are right to refer to photos of "child sexual abuse" rather than to "child porn". Professional adult porn stars pose like actors. Children don't. They are being sexually abused. Every child sex photo shows a victim and an abuser. The kids need to be protected and their abusers caught. The photos of their abuse are the evidence needed.
And let's not be sexist. Experts on both sides of the Atlantic estimate that 50% of child sexual abusers are women. When did you last read of a woman being brought to justice for child sexual abuse?
Below is a link to something a little more flagrant by Uncle Bill, put to auction in Sydney last September.
No underwear to be seen here.
Uncannily, it turns out the girl model is identical to the one depicted in the photograph sold through Menzies Art Brands a few months earlier in May, a few days after the storm broke (reproduced in Issue 16 of the Australian Art Review). In that image a sleeping child is wearing a Disney t-shirt that has ridden up to reveal her airbrushed genitalia.
Silly ole PC Plod raided galleries instead of Henson's hard drives. In the meantime, while Henson was still under Police investigation and had gone to ground under Sue Cato's voluminous PR machine, and David Marr had gleefully accepted a commission by Henson's pal Michael Heyward (Text Publishing) to write a vindicating book, and Allison Croggon had begun beavering away on her extraordinarily arrogant and borderline corrupt 'Open Letter to the PM In Defence of Bill Henson' (not in defence of civil liberties?) while having the final edit overseen by no less than Cato, Jan Minchin and Henson himself - some daggy old Hensons floated up onto the secondary market (having been offloaded by a private collector who acquired them directly from Henson).
This particular image is similar (from the same photo shoot) but not identical to that included in the 2005 Mnemosyne catalogue, which suggests that Henson may have once been engaged in the practice of selling private editions from his studio that never saw the light of day or were exhibited in public (caution image, notwithstanding that it has been classified 'PG' by the Classification Board):
http://www.menziesartbrands.com/cgi/dmcat.cgi?rm=browse&cat_id=83
The conflation of aesthetic and moral dimensions in discussions of 'transgressive' art practice, and the ignoring of the crucial relevance of the production side of the photographic process (the procuring and nude posing of under age models, etc) - not to mention the occasional curious failure to distinguish between adults and children in discussions about civil liberties and pornography - were only some of the self-serving, glaring fallacies indulged in throughout the debate.
And when one finally gets past the egregious mediocrity that is Henson, according to the "The Henson Case", the art world, the Oxleys, the 20/20 Creatives, and even the gormless David Marr himself, seem to have allowed themselves to become ensnared in certain incestuous behaviours of their own at the behest of the puppet master and his cronies...
No one is quite off the hook just yet.
Hi, Anon
Thanks for the link and for your contribution to this debate. I'm still of the opinion that a photographer is innocent until proven guilty, and I haven't seen anything by Bill that I would categorize as either porn or child sexual abuse. Of course it could be that his porn/abuse images are too rude to be shown to anyone but a member of a jury. But until I see them for myself or he is convicted by a jury, I'm not going to believe the hysteria I read in newspapers. They always make big scandals out of unimportant things and like to shock their readers.
Anonymous said...
The jury has decided: Henson's decades-long proclivities, having made a laughing-stock of the Sydney/Melbourne art establishments and intellectual elites, will be driven underground. His irredeemably mediocre landscapes, bookends to his self-described "ethnographic" child fetish, are all that will remain legally publishable and exhibitable from his photographic oeuvre under proposed new legislation in NSW.
http://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/prod/parlment/publications.nsf/key/ChildPornographyLaw
JANUARY 17, 2010 9:22 PM
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Thank you for the information and the link.
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