I left a comment for that person along the lines of, yeah, it's *totally* worse to take a kid's candy away than to rape her repeatedly for the cameras so some sicko can whack off to her pain.
God, people, get a fucking clue.
As for the pictures themselves, well, I agree with everything chavvah and lietya have said above about the ways in which stupid/naive people define "abuse". I like the pictures pretty well - I'm not sure I'm a big fan of them stylistically, but there is something about the pure nakedness of emotion that you can see in children that somehow tends to get clouded over in adulthood, as we learn to hide what we're feeling and as we become more inured to both pain and joy. I do not regard the project as terribly cruel, especially since the kids get the lollipops back after the picture is taken. There is something creepy about an adult evoking pain in a kid *for the sake of evoking pain* (because that's what it is - the pain is what she wants to shoot, after all), but a kid that young isn't noticing those nuances. Faced with the prospect of *either* having her diaper changed For Her Own Good *or* having her lolly taken away for a minute For Art's Sake, most one-year-old kids are probably going to pick having the lolly taken away because it involves less net inconvenience.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2006-07-31 09:35 pm (UTC)God, people, get a fucking clue.
As for the pictures themselves, well, I agree with everything chavvah and lietya have said above about the ways in which stupid/naive people define "abuse". I like the pictures pretty well - I'm not sure I'm a big fan of them stylistically, but there is something about the pure nakedness of emotion that you can see in children that somehow tends to get clouded over in adulthood, as we learn to hide what we're feeling and as we become more inured to both pain and joy. I do not regard the project as terribly cruel, especially since the kids get the lollipops back after the picture is taken. There is something creepy about an adult evoking pain in a kid *for the sake of evoking pain* (because that's what it is - the pain is what she wants to shoot, after all), but a kid that young isn't noticing those nuances. Faced with the prospect of *either* having her diaper changed For Her Own Good *or* having her lolly taken away for a minute For Art's Sake, most one-year-old kids are probably going to pick having the lolly taken away because it involves less net inconvenience.