Dave here
Haven't been in touch lately but just like to say this I haven't seen the photos in question but it is like this who the bloody hell would think or even consider taking photos of children of this age in the nude in the first place there is a point of stop & if we are going to set some form of morality for our young then this so called "ART" must stop before it starts but that's the point is has already started & once you open Pandoras Box then it is hard to close the lid LETS STOP THIS CRAP NOW NAKED CHILDREN IS NOT ART & THOSE THAT CONDONE IT ARE NO BETTER THAN THOSE THAT DO IT
May your Lord shine on you & your families
God Bless From
Dave

Dwg, are you going to burn down the Sistine Chapel? Where are your pitchforks. It's a shame that you think a naked child will make normal people into pedophiles. Unscientific, but then you referred to God in your post didn't you? How typical.

Tell me, as these photographs are up to 25 years old and other models have precede even that, when is this pandora's box going to open? How long does it usually take?

Go get some therapy dwg.

So the responsibility lies entirely with the observer and none with the artist? What a cop out. Are these photos any normal father would take of their pre-pubescent daughter to put in the family album? No hints of latent emerging sexuality, loss of innocence and all the other trite sub texts for the 'great unwashed' to be confused by or is it just a happy snap 'sans clothes'? I feel so inadequate in the presence of these liberated and enlighten souls.

Well said Steel.

A picture is only a picture until people read something into it. One person sees a kid, another person sees a sexual possibility whether for themselves or for others. Who has the sick mind?

It is easy to see that the porn industry has so many of our posters in bondage and that they don't even see the protection of children as a priority. Somehow they think that their right to view perversion and the degradation of men and women will somehow be threatened if they admit that Henson's work is child pornography. Don't worry folk the SBS will continue to give you your dose of perversion even if you face up to the truth. Just stop the crap and give a damn about the kids instead of your own little fetishes for a change.

I think the labels "left" and "leftist" here are not only counter-productive, but even more wrong because of their counter-intuitive nature in this case.

Imagine as "Great Champion of Workers" and "proletarian hero" one Malcolm Turnbull, who proudly admitted to owning a couple of Hensons precisely because of the added aura such association gives him in the eyes of his mates. Class pretensions around "art" have always been funny to watch, but more so in a post-modernist culture where the aesthetic usually takes a back seat to hitherto more extraneous matters of celebrity, publicity/marketing, means of communication and the increasingly esoteric conceptualizing for roles of viewer, viewed, etc.

This issue is essentially about commodification of people for an industry; the extent of commodification in this case is extreme, to the point where the aesthetic is almost negligible. The artist can (and I'd be unsurprised if he already has done) cite the achievement of eliciting reaction, getting people to debate issues, etc. Then he can return to organizing the next transfer to his account from people like Turnbull.

Henson's product reminds me of plastinated human cadavers (also much promoted by ultra-liberalist organ SBS). Such are the western world's supposedly "high values placed on human life" i.e., a commodity maybe $5-$20 per corpse, or $500 per soft kiddie porn photo shoot (with "enlightened" parents' consent).

Meanwhile, workers like myself and workmates figure out how to lynch the predators who wish that most of us become so disempowered, impoverished and degraded that the masters of cultural degeneracy more easily direct pressure - even on our children - to become their consumer items. Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Pacific Islands have witnessed much of this commerce-based mentality.