Photographers’ Books and Obscenity Charges

The Times article (“Child Porn Fight Focuses on 2 Photographers’ Books,” March 8) gives the wrong impression by lumping together the two photographers under attack, Jock Sturges and David Hamilton. The article creates the impression their work is similar when it is not.

Sturges knows the people he photographs (boys and girls, men and women) as close friends and confidants. His models are, for the most part, naturalists (nudists, if you prefer), as is the photographer. The subjects are sans clothing before and after, as well as during the making of their portrait. And if they and/or their guardians don’t like what they see, no one will see it again.

More important, the photographs represent a collaborative effort. Sturges does not get a permanent release from his subjects, and must receive their permission each time an image is used. This shows a level of respect that illustrates an important point Sturges makes time and again; his work is not about objectifying his subjects.

Randall Terry and his followers don’t care about such distinctions. Instead they’re concerning themselves with what people can and cannot look at, even in the most homogenized of national book chains. And now I find myself exhibiting in my gallery artwork whose right to exist is being questioned. I am proud to do my small part to defend Sturges’ right to make art the way he wants.

PAUL KOPERIKIN

Los Angeles

* Re Hamilton and Sturges: Unless Vladimir Nabokov was doing something Mrs. Nabokov didn’t know about, there seems to be a massive difference between literary art and photographic art. While Humbert Humbert was dallying with Lolita in Nabokov’s brain, these nude little girls are real.

How exactly does a 10- or 12-year-old “give permission” to have her body exposed? How does she feel about it, nudist colonies and the “absurdity of shame” notwithstanding? Besides the situation of these girls themselves, which seems to have been lost in legalities, one of the other grotesque features of this situation is watching a society say this is socially acceptable art because the pornography is so well done.

REBECCA SODIKOFF

Del Mar

* I’ve been a photographer for 25 years and have taken thousands of pictures of children. I also have three daughters and would never allow a photographer to take nudes of them. However, I would like to redefine what obscene pictures of children really are. They are pictures of homeless and hungry children in the United States and abroad. Where is the public outcry from the moralists who have seen these obscene photographs?

JIM HUBBARD

Venice