Tag Archive for 'bill henson'

“Bill Henson principal” cleared

Published
by
Kim
3 weeks, 3 days ago
in Art, Education, Ethics, Media, Parenting, Photography and Politics
. 63 Comments

Hardly any great surprise here:

An investigation by the Victorian Education Department has cleared the principal who allowed artist Bill Henson to scout St Kilda Park Primary School for talent of any wrongdoing.

The State Government is also refusing to ban Henson from future playground visits.

The question that needs to be asked now is why John Brumby was so quick to issue the now apparently customary and/or compulsory loud condemn, before he had even initiated an investigation. Either Brumby was insincere and joining the populist outrage crew because, hey, that’s what all pollies apparently do, or his judgement on matters pertaining to schools sucks when it comes to the results of a professional investigation and assessment of the circumstances. Either way, it’s a bad look. And either way, it raises the question of prejudging an inquiry Brumby himself called for. Not a particularly distinguished chapter in the story of Victorian governance and politics, I’d suggest.

Related posts: The extensive archive of posts on Henson and discussion on LP can be accessed here.

The Henson Case and David Marr

Published
by
Kim
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Advertising, Art, Books, Writers & Writing, Consumerism, Ethics, Media, Parenting and Politics
. 51 Comments

Well, I shelled out $24.95 for David Marr’s book, The Henson Case. I’m still inclined to think that Marr is being a bit disingenuous in claiming that he’s horrified and surprised by the furore that’s arisen over the “scouting in schools” affair/beat up and I still think it raises some broader questions about the appropriateness of the use of schools for any commercial/culture industries purposes, but that horse has probably bolted now. I’m not sure everyone’s aware that this particular media storm didn’t arise via some journo or researcher for tv or radio pouring over the book and striking headline paydirt on p. 108. Marr was actually the first to highlight this aspect of the book, featuring it in an article he wrote for his own Sydney Morning Herald on Friday - tagged as an exclusive. The book wasn’t on sale on Monday, and advance copies would have been tightly controlled by his publisher prior to that - I can’t see Alan Jones or Andrew Bolt or whoever being on Text Inc’s reviewers list.

I really don’t think Marr is so naive as to believe that others in the media wouldn’t pick up on that one aspect and make it into a very predictable story - as a senior journalist, and a former host of Media Watch, and incidentally someone who traces minutely and with great acuity the process by which the Henson story blew up in the first place (and displays an intimate knowledge of pr strategies) in his book. While Pavlov’s Cat has a lot of things to say that I agree with in this excellent post, I would respectfully disagree with her argument that Marr, publisher Michael Heyward and Text Inc. wouldn’t be attentive to the need for publicity for the book. Sure, Marr’s a very well known writer and the case was big news. But attention spans are short, and surely the whole point of marketing in book publishing is to create a buzz about a book and generate free publicity. When I bought it on Monday in a Brisbane CBD bookshop, it had been walking out the door and I was lucky to grab the last copy.

Continue reading ‘The Henson Case and David Marr’

Bill Henson, visual shock and the democratisation of art

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Art, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Ethics, Media, Photography, Politics and Sociology
. 27 Comments

As no doubt everyone has noticed, there has been a vigorous discussion in comments about the latest Bill Henson brouhouha. I don’t want to comment explicitly on the issues raised by David Marr’s “revelation” that Henson had visited a primary school in St Kilda to scout for subjects for his photographs, because I honestly don’t think the debate’s much advanced over the last round, which was covered very extensively here at LP in a series of posts, and I haven’t shifted my own view. Except to note that I agree that David Marr is probably the person who should be brought to task for dealing unethically with Henson in his rush to find a salacious story to publicise his book, which was released today. I’m sure we’re quite sensitised now to the confection of “news” to help book sales after the unending Peter Costello sales job. As a professional journalist of long standing, Marr knows better than most how to manipulate a story, and perhaps it’s the ethics of his dealing with his subject that should also be questioned.

I did want to talk about one comment which really goes to the heart of the bigger issues around Henson’s art and his professional practice - and which when viewed from a long term perspective, I think explains more of what’s going on than the framing of the previous debate in terms of “freedom of speech”. Alison Croggon, who organised the petition to Kevin Rudd about Bill Henson’s images some time ago when they were seized by police from the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Paddington, had this to say:

Alison Croggon, who organised an open letter supporting Henson from cultural delegates to the 2020 Summit, said the controversy also exposed distrust of the arts community.

“The thing that shocked me most of all about the debate was the perception that artists were above the law or were asking for special exemptions, but that was never the case,” she said. “There is a responsibility in the artistic community to address that.”

It has, of course, been addressed to some extent with the development of guidelines for artists working with minors by the Australia Council, after a request from Arts Minister Peter Garrett. But that, of course, is not as salacious a topic for the media than a beatup about putative pervs in schoolyards. Nevertheless, the disjunction between “the arts community” and publics who aren’t necessarily normally aware of its norms and practices is at the centre of all this. I didn’t know, for instance, that all manner of cultural and media industries folk seek permission regularly to utilise schools for casting, which has been the defence of Henson’s actions offered - see for example, this article in The Age by Peter Craven. A while back, my interest piqued by the whole Henson furore, I read American cultural historian Michael Kammen’s Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture.

Continue reading ‘Bill Henson, visual shock and the democratisation of art’

Baring breasts vs. baring souls

Published
by
Robert Merkel
6 months ago
in Life, Parenting, Sociology and Women
. 17 Comments

This post is a joint effort with Cassie Hampden, a postgraduate student in psychology.

One of the issues raised in the Henson brouhaha is the issue of the consent of the children modelling for the photographs, with one judge arguing whether it was really possible for consent to be granted and speculating about the possibility of a lawsuit if a model, later in life, regrets being photographed naked as a teenager.

In that context, a recent story on the 7.30 Report provides a rather interesting counterpoint. It’s a feel-good story about a 17-year-old girl, from a working-class background in a working-class Victorian town, who overcame both these barriers and a battle with anorexia and depression to win a national “Brain Bee” - essentially, a neurology quiz contest for later-year high school students. Through this success, she’s had the opportunity to do work experience at the Howard Florey Institute at Melbourne University, and travel to Montreal for the world final of the contest.

This is a wonderful achievement; and no doubt the horizons opened to her will lead in many interesting directions. But the way her story was told was unsettling on several levels.

Continue reading ‘Baring breasts vs. baring souls’

Privacy rights in Child Protection investigations: the need for the mass media to disguise identifying features on the minors in the Henson images

Published
by
tigtog
6 months ago
in Art, Consumerism, Ethics, Law, Media, Parenting, Photography and Politics
. 59 Comments

crossposted

Author Note: The original title of this post was “Do the right thing, Mainstream Media: disguise the faces of the minors in your reproductions of the Henson images NOW”, deliberately imperative because I wanted it to grab attention in people’s feed readers and hopefully provoke an immediate reaction. That has happened, the faces are now being pixellated in the mass media (not that I’m claiming that this is a direct result of this post), so I’m changing the title to something that sounds a bit more like “me” speaking.

* * *
The Age has an article quoting the mother of the girl whose image is the most widely disseminated with respect to the investigation of complaints against artist Bill Henson’s nude studies of adolescents. The mother defends Henson against claims that he did anything unethical, and mentions in a statement given to The Age via an intermediary that he has been a friend of the family for over 10 years, that her daughter has “a keen interest in the arts” and that the whole family were well acquainted with Henson’s work before the photo-shoot.

The Age claims to have discovered that the pictures were taken last year, and that the girl is still 13 years of age. That contradicts earlier reports that the images were several years old, which would have made the girl perhaps now 16 or 18, i.e. possibly made her no longer a minor. If The Age is correct, then she is still very much under-age, and I’m pretty sure that that creates a problem for the media who have disseminated Henson’s images of her online and in the press, or at least it certainly should.

I only yesterday realised that the censored images of Henson’s work readily available online mostly lack one key ingredient that we usually see when images of minors are at the heart of a news cycle about alleged sexual exploitation/abuse - there has been no black bar or pixellation over the face to disguise the minor’s identity.

Why the hell not? Continue reading ‘Privacy rights in Child Protection investigations: the need for the mass media to disguise identifying features on the minors in the Henson images’