THE END OF INNOCENCE ONCE, NOT SO LONG AGO, PICTURES OF NAKED CHILDREN MAD US SMILE. NOW THEY MAKE US SHIVER DETROIT FREE PRESS (FP) - SUNDAY September 23, 1990 By: SUSAN AGER Edition: METRO FINAL Section: MAG Page: 6 Word Count: 4,345 MEMO: SUSAN AGER is associate editor of the Detroit Free Press Magazine. TEXT: HE IS A PALE, BLOND BOY, BALANCED serenely atop a high-backed armchair, his legs apart to keep him steady. His mother says it was a red velvet chair, and she got rid of it long ago, although she regrets that now. Then, though, the chair was next to his mother's refrigerator, in her kitchen in SoHo in New York City in 1976. In the photo, you can see the appliance's cord running behind the chair. And the boy is naked, as he often was in those days, or so he and his mother say. It was an uneventful afternoon, or at least he can't remember much. The photographer, who had met his mother at the bar where she worked, pointed his camera at the boy, and the boy looked back at it, unflinching. Later, his mother hung the black-and-white photo over her sofa, exactly as the photographer had framed it: behind a matte of black and gray silk. Later still, when she was broke, she sold other work she owned by the same photographer, including pictures of herself. But she never sold the portrait of her son, for which she paid, she thinks, $200. Then, hardly anyone knew Robert Mapplethorpe's name. Now, Mapplethorpe is dead. And that photo by him is worth a whole lot of money -- at least $12,000. It, and one other Mapplethorpe photo of a child, are at the heart of an obscenity trial scheduled to begin Monday in Cincinnati. The trial may redefine for artists and photographers across the country what sort of photos they can and can't take of children, even their own children. Child pornography , critics have called the photo of 5-year-old Jesse McBride on a chair in his mother's kitchen. They say the same about the one of 2-year-old Rosie, a British child sitting on an ornate concrete garden bench. Her right knee is up, and because of that, her dress is up, and she is wearing no underpants. No one knows how the jury will respond to these photos, which resemble so closely the ones most American families have tucked casually behind cellophane in their vinyl photo albums. No one can predict how the jurors will determine whether they are lewd, or innocent, or somewhere in between. Will they eye the kids' genitals and measure some inner pulse? Will the prosecution pose other questions that may apply: How often did said child really go without clothes? How hot was it on the day in question? And why would a good mother want such a photo anyway? Both moms -- Jesse's and Rosie's -- signed affidavits this spring: They commissioned the works in 1976. They agreed to have them shown as part of a seven-city traveling Mapplethorpe exhibit. Neither mom is charged. Nor is Mapplethorpe, dead 17 months now from AIDS. Charged, instead, is Dennis Barrie, the director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati where 81,000 people -- a record number at that gallery -- paid $4 to view the Mapplethorpe exhibit. Barrie faces additional obscenity charges for showing 5 other controversial images of homoerotic acts -- the sorts of things some gay men do, alone or together. The affidavits of both mothers were not enough to persuade editors of this newspaper, or any other mainstream print media in America, to publish the children's photos. Only one public TV station in Boston broadcast them and the other disputed photos when the exhibit opened there Aug. 1. The station received more than 100 calls, more than two-thirds of them supportive. But complaints have been filed with the FCC that the broadcast violated FCC standards of decency. Still, most Americans haven't seen the pictures. For them, no reasoned conclusion is possible. But that neither the Detroit Free Press nor the Washington Post not Time nor Newsweek has dared print the photos of the nude children inevitably lends credence to suspicions that they must be quite disgusting. WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO us? Once, not so long ago, pictures of naked children made us smile. Now they make us shiver. But, it can be argued, once we were naive. Now, thanks to newspapers and magazines and Geraldo and "Inside Edition" and made-for-TV movies, we figure we're smarter about the perverts out there: high school principals with stashes of kiddie porn ; sleazy employees at day-care centers; pedophile priests accosting generation after generation of altar boys; Radio Shack managers secretly videotaping their teenaged employees having sex in the back room. The more we know, the more we fear, and the more we can imagine. In such an atmosphere of raw hysteria, everyone is soon suspect, and pictures of naked children begin to seem invasive, exploitive and wrong. As a result, artists and photographers are ensnared by the worries of a public obsessed with kids' vulnerability to sadists, perverts, pornographers and even their own well-meaning parents. Mapplethorpe is dead, but others who are alive and well are under fire for what amount to well-lit, well-composed versions of the Billy-in-the-buff snapshots most American families cherish. A sampling of what they've been through: * On a hot day in July two years ago, six men with guns stood in Alice Sims' Virginia backyard and accused her of child pornography . "We're going to take your children," they told her. "No, you're not," she shot back. But they did. Aged 1 and 6, her kids were taken from her for 18 hours and examined for evidence of child abuse after authorities seized snapshots of them and a friend's 4-year-old daughter playing naked on a bed. Sims, a locally successful artist, had dropped the film at a local drugstore, the one she'd used to develop similar photos that helped guide her in making colored-pencil drawings of children playing in water. "Water Babies," she called the series. After her encounter with the police, she never finished it. No charges were filed against Sims or her husband. She quit her job teaching art at her son's elementary school and the family moved from Virginia to Maryland. "It just felt uncomfortable" staying, Sims said. The newspaper had made them out to be pornographers . At the 7-Eleven, her husband had an uneasy encounter with one of the social workers who took their children away. And they found themselves uncomfortable skinny-dipping in their own backyard pool, behind their own 8-foot fence. For four months after the incident, Sims' 6-year-old insisted on wearing his underwear in the bathtub because the police had told him bad men would do bad things to him if they saw him naked. For nine months afterwards, Sims did no drawing at all. Now, though, she has resumed her art because she has a show opening at gallery in Washington this winter. She is drawing fish. * Patti Ambrogi, an upstate New York instructor of photography, underwent a 90-minute interview by child protection authorities last December after four anonymous complaints were filed against her. Several photos in an exhibit of her work featured her twin daughters nude, from ages 2 to about 3 1/2. In the most controversial photo, one twin lay between her father's legs in the bathtub, the back of her head on his lap, a washcloth on her chest, a dreamy smile on her face. Among the questions interviewers posed to her and her husband, George: Was George wearing his swimsuit in the bathtub photo? "Do you normally wear your suit when you bathe?" George replied. Patti Ambrogi challenged the investigator: Didn't he ever take baths with his own kids? Sure, he answered. "Well then," she recalls saying, "you and I are on equal ground. But I have a picture and you don't." Again, no charges were filed, but Ambrogi and her husband were shaken by the episode, and she has barely photographed since. The photos of her daughters lay untouched in a closed cardboard box. * A decade ago, Jackie Livingston , a photography professor at Cornell University, was spurned by her friends, accused of child pornography and fired from her untenured teaching job after she exhibited photographs of her son, her husband and her father-in-law in the nude. Some of the photos were close-ups of the older men's penises and testicles. Some showed her son, Sam, masturbating at age 6. No charges were filed against her, and she and other women settled a sex discrimination suit against Cornell for $250,000. But to this day she is unemployed, feels blacklisted by colleges and universities and says, "I've just been through hell over my photographs." Last year she unlisted her home phone number after yet another crank caller inquired about her sex life with her son. * Sally Mann, a small-town Virginia photographer with an international reputation, has exhibited many photos of her three children playing nude on the family's 400-acre farm. Last year, a local matron called the cops to the town's artists cooperative, which was selling a book by Mann. The book includes a photo of Mann's daughter, at about 2, asleep naked on a stained mattress. "Wet Bed," the photo is called. The cops shrugged and allowed that if the U.S. Supreme Court couldn't define obscenity, neither could they. Later, at an exhibit in Washington, another woman threatened to file obscenity charges against Mann, although she never did. But Mann's 10-year-old son's elementary school buddies teased him when the Washington Post printed one of his mother's most famous photos, entitled "The Last Time Emmett Modeled Nude." * San Francisco photographer Jock Sturges lost 40 pounds and a lucrative account with a local ballet after the FBI raided his studio in April and seized his work, about half of which is photographs of men, women and children of all ages on nude beaches in California and France. The FBI insists the photos in question -- reported by the manager of a film-developing lab -- are unlike those Sturges has exhibited in galleries and museums. Joe Folberg, the owner of the gallery where Sturges exhibits his work, says the photos feature a young girl who is "a gymnast, fooling around, horseplaying with her father." Within two weeks of the Sturges episode, the gallery sold about 45 of his photos, compared to about 8 in the year preceding the FBI seizure. The FBI won't release the photos, and continues to investigate Sturges. Among other things, Sturges says, agents have called people listed in his address book to inquire about his sexual practices. He told a San Francisco arts newspaper that he feared his artistic ability had been badly hurt by the raid and publicity about it, that it had "brainwashed me into thinking I'm some kind of evil person." * In Houlton, Maine, U.S. Customs officials confiscated a 30-year-old black-and-white self-portrait of New Mexico photographer Walter Chappell, seated naked on the ground amid autumn leaves. His penis is erect and he is holding in his arms his naked baby son. The photo, "Father and Son," is well-known in art circles, and has appeared in a Harper & Row coffee table book on American nudes. But it was seized at the border in January from a woman transporting it into the U.S. for a friend who had moved. Again, no charges were ever filed, although U.S. Attorney Richard Cohen declared the photo "quite offensive." After deliberating for seven months, authorities finally released the photo in July and abandoned the case. EACH CASE HAS THE CHILLing effect of a blizzard on the artists, who find themselves mired in rage, panic and self-doubt. Says A.D. Coleman, who founded a special committee in 1982 to investigate censorship of photographers: "They will very often turn away from that subject matter, stop showing that particular body of work and frequently doubt themselves, question their own motives, and be suspicious of themselves." The response is similar to rape trauma, he adds. "Very often they have been invaded -- their files are seized, their inner life becomes a matter of general speculation by the community, their image of themselves as a good person is suddenly and dramatically and publicly undermined. There's hardly an accusation more heinous you can make in our culture than child molester." Beatrix Nevill, the mother of the little girl Mapplethorpe photographed, refuses to be interviewed because she fears nasty publicity from the London tabloids, say officials of the Mapplethorpe Foundation that mounted the exhibit. One photographer interviewed at length for this story called back later to insist nothing from the interview be used, lest it draw unpleasant and unwelcome new attention. Another provided prints of controversial photos, but days later begged they not be published. "It's getting more dangerous," the photographer said. "They could come back after me." Some asked that untoward details of their lives -- such as one couple's decision to cohabit before marriage -- go unmentioned. Aha! If they're innocent of pornographic intentions, what are they so afraid of? They're afraid of attention. They're afraid of judgment. They're afraid of hysteria. And, in some cases, they're afraid for their children -- not that the children are revealed naked to the eyes of hundreds of thousands of strangers, but that the children may be pitied or hounded for being photographed without clothes. Aren't most pictures of naked children just innocent pictures of kids without clothes? Is anyone suggesting that any photo of a naked child is pornographic ? But won't the most innocent photographs of nude children still stir the lust of pedophiles? And, to define the controversy in bald terms, if even one man (or woman) masturbates while eying a naked kid -- even a bare-bottomed baby in a diaper ad -- shouldn't we prohibit such images? Yet, isn't it safe to assume that someone in this vast country of ours would be turned on even by a photo of Mr. Potato Head, or George Bush in a suit? If one of photography's aims is to capture real life, and that involves kids playing nude, what's the harm? Who else will record the loveliness, and the sensuality, of children, if not loving adults with cameras? Yet, isn't it exploitive to photograph young children nude, then exhibit their portraits to strangers in galleries and museums? They're too young to protest. They're too young to know better. What humiliation might they suffer, now or later? Wouldn't it be better for photographers who photograph their kids naked to just keep the damned photos in their own family albums and spare the rest of us and the children? If our aim is to protect children, why does Madison Avenue use them to sell products? Why do we allow teens wearing Jordache jeans, for example, to be photographed in sexually provocative poses? No genitals are visible -- but is that enough to redeem those photos? And does frontal nudity always equal pornography ? "If Mapplethorpe were alive today, I think even he'd be going under," says Jackie Livingston , whose work is owned by many of the same museums that own Mapplethorpe's. "I don't think when you're alive you can fight these fights and still keep your head above water, living in this sexually-repressed society of ours." She intends to publish a book portraying her son's growing up, including many naked shots, but she figures she'll have to publish it in Europe. Alice Sims says this of her decision to draw naked fish now instead of her own children: "I think about being a fighter and a rabble-rouser, but I don't want to fight at my children's expense." And Sally Mann says this about the innocent days when she could comfortably photograph her family nude: "America's a very uptight society, and we've ruined that natural quality about our bodies. It was possible once, in my family, for all of us to be comfortable, but invariably, if you're raised in this society, you have to concede defeat." THE RELUCTANCE OF QUEASY editors to publish the Mapplethorpe photos means you won't just stumble upon them. They are not easy to see, nor are most others of nude kids that have been targets of controversy. The art lover or the merely curious or the pervert each must make serious efforts to view these photos. Transportation must be found to a museum or a gallery or a bookstore. Money must be handed over. What, then, is the problem here? Who are the victims of these photographs? Certainly not you and I, who don't have to look if we don't want to. The parents? Nope. They either approve of the photos, or themselves hold the cameras. The kids? How will we know if the kids are harmed? Alice Sims' daughter was only 1, too young to remember the 18 hours she spent away from home. Sims' son, though, is now 8, and vividly recalls the day authorities spirited him away for questioning. This summer, during a month-long camping trip, Sims and her husband took the kids to a nudist resort to show the boy that some people choose not to wear clothes, that it's OK under some circumstances, that the body is a beautiful thing. The Simses considered suing the Virginia officials who questioned their kids, but knew they would have to prove their children had been harmed, and they figured they'd been through enough tests already, including a 2-hour physical examination. "I would like to think," Alice Sims says now, "that they weren't adversely affected by this, that their lives certainly aren't going to be scarred forever." Patti Ambrogi's twins, just turned 5, stick their tongues out now when Mom points her camera at them, but that's about being 5, not about being abused. They're nude less often now, preferring instead to play dress-up. Her old photos of them, and their own crayon drawings, adorn the walls of the 19th Century farmhouse Ambrogi and her husband restored. There is nothing to suggest they've been hurt. Sally Mann's kids have for years been completely at ease with their nudity, and unconcerned about Mom's photos of them, although she suspects they are reaching an "age of embarrassment," during which she may need to withdraw certain photos of them from her exhibits. The models for Jock Sturges' work have not been heard from, and no one is providing their names. Jackie Livingston 's son is 21 and "on the road, on a spiritual quest" out West. Last time she photographed him he was doing yoga nude in a river bed. He calls her once a week, usually on Fridays. Recently, he told her he'd looked at the pictures of himself again, and that he thought they were beautiful. "That had me in tears," she says. What's more, she says, "Whatever is supposed to evilly happen to you when you masturbate, doesn't happen. He's grown up to be a very healthy, happy kid. He's very anti-establishment, with politics very much like mine were in the '60s. He goes to nude beaches with us, and went to Puerto Rico to learn to sail, and is getting his education now traveling." Walt Chappell's son is about 30 now, and could not be found. Chappell would not take a call from me, instead suggesting through a spokesperson that questions be mailed to him. He did not respond. Beatrix Nevill, the British noblewoman who hired Mapplethorpe to photograph her little daughter, isn't talking, and neither is her daughter, Rosie, now 16. But Jesse McBride, who posed next to his mother's refrigerator when he was a boy, did not hesitate. WHEN I CALLED, A YOUNG man answered the phone. I explained that I was seeking Clarissa Dalrymple. "She's at work," he said, and asked polite questions about the nature of my call. I left my name and number and explained that I wanted to talk with her about the controversial Mapplethorpe portrait of her naked son. "That's my photograph!" he shouted, and I could hear what sounded like pride in his voice, and I was surprised by his gusto. Somehow, I had expected him to be at least uneasy, and perhaps ashamed, of his controversial portrait. He talked about it eagerly, though, although he was short on detailed memories. It was a day in 1976 like any other. Not a momentous event in any 5-year-old's life. His mother had met Mapplethorpe at the Broom Street Bar. She was a waitress, he an aspiring photographer. "He used to come in every day and have his lunch, or snacks," Clarissa Dalrymple recalls, when we finally talk. "He sort of picked me up, actually. I mean, he was very sexy, Robert. And he did like women, you know." They became close friends, although Dalrymple won't say now how close. He was often over to her apartment. She asked him to photograph her youngest child and offered to pay him a bit, probably not more than $200, she thinks now. Mapplethorpe wasn't yet famous. And he wasn't fearsome. So Jesse remembers the moment only vaguely. "I think I was probably already naked when he came over," he says. "Because I ran around nude a lot when I was a little kid. He came over and he was gonna photograph me, and I was just jumping around on that chair. "It was in my mother's apartment, right in the kitchen/dining area, next to the refrigerator." That's what the wire is in the photo, he says -- the cord from the refrigerator to the wall. His voice trails off. "That's it, really. That's all there was to it." DALRYMPLE REMEMBERS that Mapplethorpe exhibited Jesse's portrait that same year in his first big exhibition, at Holly Solomon gallery on West Broadway. Simultaneously, across the street, the image was part of an exhibit of male nudes at The Kitchen gallery. She was very proud of it. And there was no stir at all. "It was a freer time," she sighs. "There was no controversy. Just interest." The photo hangs to this day in the living room of her SoHo apartment, over an old sofa covered with a white parachute because money is still tight. Dalrymple has since gotten rid of the red velvet chair on which Jesse played nude, although now she wishes she hadn't. Another print hangs in the hall of Jesse's father's Los Angeles home, opposite the bedroom where Jesse sleeps when he's there. His father is film director Jim McBride, who made "The Big Easy," "Breathless," "Great Balls of Fire." Jesse's parents, still close friends, never married and have been separated for nigh on 15 years now. Jesse's dad first learned of the controversy over his son's photo while watching an NBC newscast last year. "His picture popped up, with a big black bar over his crotch," Jim McBride says. He's infuriated by suggestions that the photo session somehow twisted his son. "He's a fine young man, a great human being . . . That photograph is a great memento of my kid's youth." Jesse's mother gets impatient about the whole thing. "If there was no implication that Robert was homosexual, I doubt there would be any controversy at all." She imagines critics of her boy's photo thinking, "My God, that disgusting man! Taking photographs of little children, daring to get near them, this diseased person." Homophobia, says Clarissa Dalrymple, "has a thousand logics to it." A Brit who emigrated here in her late 20s, she barely understands those logics. "There's an extraordinary puritanism about this country, you notice all the time. We've had nudes on TV for a donkey's age, and been allowed to say f--- on TV for years and years. This is a very innocent, almost naive society." And Jesse? What does he think? "I think it's ridiculous. I think the picture is beautiful. It's a piece of art." He wasn't molested by Mapplethorpe? He laughs. "It was a very innocent thing." He hasn't suffered great psychological trauma over this? He hasn't been hounded or pitied by his friends? "They think it's funny. They think it's cool to have a friend who's got so much publicity." He's never been to Cincinnati, and he's no critic of art, but he's 19, and he can't understand the furor over Mapplethorpe, either the photos of two naked kids, or of naked male adults. "I've seen art I didn't think was good, but I've never found it offensive. Those pictures, Robert Mapplethorpe's pictures of the masochistic stuff, some of those where he's sticking a whip up his anus, I found shocking, but I don't find it offensive at all. I find it intriguing, interesting. It's not just the bright side of life, but the darker part." He's off this fall to begin his freshman year at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, after traveling the world for a few months. He celebrated his 19th birthday alone in Agra, India, watching a full moon rise over the Taj Mahal. He's the sort of independent kid every mother would want. So imagine Clarissa Dalrymple's reaction when she saw a brief interview with her neo-celebrity son in the Village Voice a couple months ago. In the Voice photo, Jesse's now-famous portrait is leaning against a wall. Jesse, at 19, grins at it from a perch atop an armchair. He is stark naked. "It was actually more or less my idea," he says unabashedly of the pose, identical to the one he struck at 5. Says his mother: "I must confess I was completely shocked." CAPTION: PHOTO Despite signed affidavits from the mothers giving permission for their children's nude pictures to be used in the Cincinnati exhibit, publications such as the Detroit Free Press Magazine have declined to print the Mapplethorpe pictures. Sally Mann's son posed for one of her most famous photos, "The Last Times Emmett Modeled Nude." Says Mann, "America's a very uptight society, and we've ruined that natural quality about our bodies. It was possible once...for all of us to be comfortable, but invariably, if you're raised in this society, you have to concede defeat."