ARTS WATCH : In Camera Nightmare

The enforcement of pornography laws is certainly a necessary pursuit, but from the outset of the federal case against acclaimed fine-arts photographer Jock Sturges, the instinct was that the FBI had the wrong man.

Now a federal grand jury has agreed. In an action that caught the law enforcement community by surprise and relieved an anxious art community, not only in California but across the nation, the grand jury refused after a 17-month federal investigation to indict Sturges for taking allegedly pornographic pictures of children.

The collected works of Sturges frequently focus on nude photographs, including ones of women and children, and they have been exhibited at many of the world’s most famous museums and galleries. There is no question that Sturges is an artist.

But alerted by a San Francisco photo lab last year that it had received allegedly suggestive negatives of nude girls, the FBI swung into action. The rest of the story--including the confiscation of camera equipment by agents--was a nightmare for Sturges. Legal action on his behalf is being contemplated against officials involved in the lengthy probe.

If there is a happy ending here--beyond the fact that an artist has escaped the indiscriminate jaws of the justice bureaucracy--it is in the San Francisco grand jury’s bold exercise of independence. It’s often said that a prosecutor could get almost any grand jury to indict, oh say, Santa Claus for breaking and entering. In this case the grand jury members said to a prosecutor: Nothing doing. Good for them.