What the cat dragged in

Bill Henson, art and child porn

Distinguishing photo/video art from child porn, is – or at least should be – much simpler than in the case of adult-actor porn.

With naked and/or sexualised adults, the production process for consensual porn and art is essentially the same – the models/actors do what is asked of them by the man (as it almost always is) behind the camera. It is only the context of the finished product – and not the finished product itself – that is best able to place an ambiguous enterprise in an “art” or “porn” pigeonhole. In the end, though, even this context – e.g. is it displayed in an art gallery, or is it on a pay-per-view Internet site? – can sometimes be hopelessly subjective or of circular logic.

With children, such context scarcely matters, a fact which seems to escape a lot of commentators in the present debate. The production process for child porn is the litmus test – there simply are no consensual actors within the finished product, whatever its context. A child’s exploitation will often be objectively clear from the face of the finished product, but if this is ambiguous (as are Henson’s images, in my opinion), further inquiries can be made to get at the objective truth of the production process.

Thus, the unnamed, apparently pre-pubescent girl depicted in the offending images (and unpixellated in today’s Age) surely has an important voice in all this, as do her parents.

I do not know how Bill Henson recruits his child models, nor the details of the contractual arrangements he makes in connection with them (presumably contracts between parent/s and Henson). Something that Henson has twice said, in media interviews canvassing this very topic, does strike me as flippantly rote, however. The comments, which were made almost two years apart, are:

“Though Henson says his golden rule is ‘never apologise, never explain’, he does tackle the accusations of exploitation, pointing out that he remains in contact with many of the people he has photographed over the years, an unlikely outcome if the subjects had felt violated in any way. ‘I have dinner with people who are going bald who I photographed when they were 12,’ he says.”

- “Twilight zone” by Miriam Cosic, Weekend Australian Magazine 22 March 2003 (no URL)

“[M]any of those young models remain his friends and supporters today.”
(presumably paraphrasing something that Henson said).

- “Emerging from the shadows” by Rosalie Higson, Australian 7 January 2005 (no URL)