Spiritual America Meets Puritanical Britain?

In 1975 the perhaps aptly named Gary Gross, who had been taking pictures for Teri Shields, made a series of images of her 10 year old daughter. Teri had been managing her daughter Brooke’s career as a model more or less since her birth (she first appeared in an advert aged 11 months) and Gross had photographed for her regularly. This particular series of pictures was made for a project of his with Playboy Press, The Woman in the Child, which set out to explore the femininity of young girls, and Teri signed a comprehensive model release in return for a fee of $450.

It’s a set of images that has several times caused controversy. In 1981 Brooke tried to buy back the negatives from the photographer and then took a million dollar lawsuit against him. But the contract signed by her mother stood the test, even after a lengthy appeal. Her lawyers then tried to get the pictures banned as a violation of her privacy, but the court threw this out, probably taking into consideration what the StyleList blog describes as her “sordid history of being sexualized as a child. There was her portrayal of a 12-year-old prostitute in 1978’s “Pretty Baby,” the nude scenes of a 14-year-old Shields in “The Blue Lagoon,” and the notorious “What comes between me and my Calvins?” Calvin Klein ads a year later.”

In throwing out the case – which more or less ruined Gross, despite his victory – the court stated “these photographs are not sexually suggestive, provocative or pornographic, nor do they imply sexual promiscuity. They are pictures of a prepubescent girl posing innocently in her bath”, but it’s a verdict that many, apparently including the ‘Vice’ at the Metropolitan Police, disagree with.

Richard Prince is not one of my favourite photographers, largely because in my opinion he is not a photographer at all, but an artist who uses – and often abuses – photographers, failing in a number of cases either to give them proper attribution or a decent share of the loot. But in this case he appears in the end to have done the decent thing so far as Gross was concerned in getting his agreement for the use of one of these images in his piece ‘Spiritual America’, which appeared in what David Deitcher described in a 2004 feature in Artforum as “a now all-but-forgotten exhibition: works by Sarah Charlesworth, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Allan McCollum, and Richard Prince; opening on the evening of February 1, 1984, at a place called Spiritual America, 5 Rivington Street, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.”

In his surprisingly readable and informative piece (neither truly native to Artforum) he reminds us that the title of the work is also a lift – from Alfred Stieglitz who gave the title in 1923 to an image of the rear flank of a gelded harness horse, an image and titling that impressed Prince greatly. You can also read about the image in a 1993 feature by Carol Squiers and Brian Wallis from Art in America, Is Richard Prince a Feminist (which includes an interview withPrince) which says that there was yet another legal controversy, this time over Prince’s plans to publish a limited edition of 1000 copies of ‘his’ image at $999, undercutting a planned 1000 copy edition of the picture by a poster company and Gross by a dollar a print. Apparently an acceptable settlement was reached.

According to the Guardian, Tate Modern had taken legal advice before deciding to put Prince’s version on display as a part of their Pop Life exhibition which opened on 1 Oct. But it opened without ‘SpiritualAmerica’  as the Met, having read about the forthcoming show in Scotland Yard’s copy of the Daily Mail, raided the gallery and persuaded them to remove the picture from the show. The catalogue in which it was listed has also been withdrawn. (The Daily Mail story has since been updated on-line to reflect the vice squad’s action.)

In writing this piece, I’ve been careful – for legal reasons – to not to link to sites which contain the full controversial image. If you want to see it, it has been published here many times in books and magazines and Google will enable you to find it in a couple of clicks, along with other images of Brooke taken by Gross, although the main site on which they were apparently housed is unobtainable, probably because of the intense demand fuelled by the story.  It does seem yet another occasion on which our law is making an ass of itself.

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