Aussie artist's teen nudes on display

Art works by the Australian photographer whose images of nude children were investigated by police in Sydney last year are going on show for the first time in Auckland.

Bill Henson, a giant on the Australian art scene, became the centre of a furore last May when New South Wales police seized 20 of his photographs of a naked adolescent girl and boy from Roslyn Oxley9 dealer-gallery on the eve of a show opening.

The show contained portraits of nude children as young as 12, some of which had been taken 10 years ago.

No charges were laid and the photos were returned and later exhibited.

But politicians and child safety groups slated the works as offensive and pornographic. Australian PM Kevin Rudd called them "revolting" and without artistic value.

Hetty Johnson of child protection group Bravehearts, which complained to police, said Henson "has a tendency to depict children naked and that's porn".

Auckland police said they would monitor the New Zealand show.

But Auckland Art Gallery insists it does not expect the same outcry when 10 of Henson's photos go on display in its show of recent acquisitions, opening June 18.

The photos, different from those seized in Sydney, include images of an adolescent boy and girl. In one, the boy is naked and kneeling near a bicycle and car with his back and side to the viewer. Another shows him embracing the girl. The photos come from a series between 1998 and 2000.

AUT art historian Jan Bryant said Henson's images of naked children tap into a moral panic about paedophilia.

She said the Australian controversy was blown out of proportion and stopped people discussing the actual works.

"Why can't we have a discussion without becoming hysterical and without sounding like you're supporting a pervy old man?"

Gallery director Chris Saines called them "very beautiful, melancholic, evocative works of art".

He said the Australian outcry looked like a conservative backlash.

"These works sometimes work as lightning rods, they become tests of public taste and tolerance."

But Henson was a deeply serious artist, Saines said. "He does not make work of this kind to titillate or provoke, he makes it because he explores the twilight zone, the spaces between light and dark, male and female, childhood and adolescence, and sometimes they're slippery spaces, and in the public mind it can seem like a boundary has been crossed."

Saines argued images were only pornographic if they were created to gratify sexual fantasy or desire, and that had never been Henson's intent.

It was just as absurd to accuse Caravaggio and Michelangelo, who sculpted and painted young boys of the same age group, of creating porn.

Henson gained the consent of the models and their parents, said Saines.

"I don't think there's any unknowing or unwary party, as there might be in illegal pornography."

Denise Ritchie of Stop Demand Foundation, a group combating child sexual exploitation, said the images did not appear to exploit children. The models were depicted in reflective, brooding poses rather than overtly sexualised, she said.

"It appears that the gallery's main aim is for an exhibition that will have wider public appeal, rather than one likely to court controversy."

Henson did not respond to emailed questions last week.

He has told The Australian: "You can't control the way individuals respond to the work."

Elsewhere, he has defended his work as trying to explore "something which is absolutely inviolate and unknowable".