A few days ago, I read the story of Billy Miller, an American soldier who, while deployed in Afghanistan, was arrested on charges of possessing child pornography for having pictures of his niece in a one-piece swimsuit!!!

I am outraged. I am incensed. I am furious.

I despise pornography, in all it’s forms, and especially child porn. I think it’s disgusting, debasing, and disrespectful. If consenting adults want to participate in the making of such filth, that’s fine by me, but I want no part of it. I won’t make it, and I won’t watch it.

This hysteria and paranoia over pictures of kids, however, has gone too effing far!!! Pull your heads out, people! Nudity is not the same thing as pornography!!!!! The demonization of nudity is both irrational and counterproductive. Such an attitude teaches our young people to feel fear and embarrassment about their bodies, at a time in their lives when they desperately need to learn to respect themselves. It’s stupid.

Think about this for a minute:

How do we judge other cultures? How do we decide how “advanced” they are or were? How do we know what we know about how they lived and what their societies were like? Take the Greeks and the Romans as examples. How do we know what we know about them, their culture, their way of life? What did they leave behind for us to know them by?

Art. The artifacts created by their artists, artisans and craftsmen. Paintings, mosaics, carvings, statues, poems, plays, literature, music.

What does it say about our culture, when the creation of such things is forcibly stifled? Aren’t we supposed to be a society that values freedom?

Over the last two weeks, several people I know have experienced the trauma of having their Flickr or FaceBook accounts terminated, or individual images removed, because their photographs included something that is perfectly acceptable in their local culture: naked people, some of whom are children.

In defense of Flickr and FaceBook, their terms of service include prohibitions and controls on images depicting nudity. They do this partly because they want to attract as many people as possible to their services, so they want to be sensitive about offending people. Thus, they put policies in place about keeping some things out of the open-to-the-public areas, but allowing them in private, invite-only areas. I’m perfectly fine with that. As a libertarian, I respect their right to run their business the way they want to. Those servers are theirs, that software was created by them, and they have the right to control how and to whom they give access to it.

For more examples of this kind of prosecutorial zeal, involving many different facets of everyday life, see Harvey Silverglate’s book Three Felonies a Day.

Images involving naked children, however, are a different story. In a society where parents can be imprisoned or have their children forcibly removed from them simply because the person at the 1-hour photo lab doesn’t like that they have snapshots of the toddler in the tub (as in the case of Lisa and A.J. Demaree), or running through the garden sprinkler in their undies, or for an art class assignment (as in the case of Toni Marie Angeli), it’s no longer an issue of what the service providers want. It’s an issue of over-zealous prosecutors using laws with rubber-band meanings as a cudgel to punish people for behaving, not in ways that are legitimately harmful to others, but merely in ways that they don’t approve of.

The service providers, in an effort to avoid being accused of harboring “kiddie porn”, delete anything that might even remotely resemble such filth, and end up banning totally innocent and benign images, “just in case”. Understandably, they don’t want to face having to defend themselves in court. Even if the images are found to be legal, the cost in time and money to defend them in court is so astronomically high, that they’d go bankrupt.

“The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or politics, but it is not the path to knowledge.” - Carl Sagan

This is how a small but vocal minority abuse the authority of government to force their prudish views about nudity on everybody, including those in their own country who don’t share those views, and even people in foreign lands where their laws have no jurisdiction.

The internet is a world-wide phenomenon. People from all different lands and cultures can use it to communicate with each other.

People from Europe find it difficult to understand why Americans seem to think that the female breast is something obscene. People from southeast Asia and South America and Africa wonder why they have to flag photographs of their kids frolicking in the river as “Not Safe For Work”.

What does it say about our society, when we allow our judicial system to be used as a threat to prevent people from freely sharing their culture with the world; when we allow a small minority of zealots to wield the police and the courts as weapons against others who would say something they don’t like?

How many photographers, painters, poets, songwriters, playwrights, sculptors, authors and musicians never expressed what was truly in their hearts, because they were afraid of going to jail for it? How many beautiful, inspiring, uplifting, informative, challenging ideas were never made into photographs, sculptures, paintings, books, poems and songs, because the artists didn’t have the financial wherewithal to defend themselves against the tax-funded court system?

Art is supposed to be difficult. It’s supposed to make us uncomfortable. It’s supposed to challenge our ideas. It’s supposed to make us think. It’s supposed to hold a mirror up to our culture and show us the silly, nonsensical things we do by sheer force of habit.

Do we really want to limit the pool of ideas in art to those that will not offend anyone, just because some people are narrow-minded and squeamish?

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” - Thomas Jefferson

Ten generations from now, when people look back on us the way we look back on ancient Rome and make judgements about the morality and ethics of our society, what conclusions must they draw from the art we’ve left behind? Will they be able to see that we were a people who actually believed in and lived by the tenets of freedom and liberty set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, or will they only see the hypocrisy that our modern courts’ interpretations of those ideas have become?

It’s time to end the hysteria, and do what the founders of our nation did: Use our rational minds.

I saw this posted on Twitter, and thought to myself “That can’t be right”. Then a quick Google search confirmed it from multiple sources. I’m about to lose one of my biggest competitors. Kiddie Kandids is no more. It seems that even the biggest of photography chains can underprice itself out of existence.

Truthfully, what I do and what Kiddie Kandids (and so many of the other chain-store photography studios) do is very, very different. Their target market is very different from mine. Nonetheless, the vast majority of the “viewing public” will see us as competitors, however indirect, because both they and I specialize in making portraits of children.

What can you, as a consumer, take away from the demise of this business? One simple rule: Beware the lowest price.

Many, if not most, chain-store photo studios do not set their prices based on a job-costing model. They aim to offer the lowest price to the customer, and cover their overhead operating expenses with volume, leading to a get-them-in-and-get-them-out cookie-cutter approach. Those affiliated with department stores will often go even further, using a loss-leader model where they’ll charge you less than it costs them to make the pictures, to get you into the store, where you’ll buy things from other departments - things that are highly profitable for them. I remember reading about a study done some years ago (sorry, I can’t find the reference to it offhand - if you have a link, or a counterexample, please email me) that claimed that customers who bought the least expensive portrait package from Sears Portrait Studio, ended up leaving the store with something like $400- worth of goods from other departments.

Please remember, when you’re shopping around for a portrait photographer, that you really do get what you pay for.

Who would you rather have making photographs of your kids:

The guy (or gal) making minimum wage at the department store, whose primary purpose is to get you back out on the sales floor as quickly as possible, or the dedicated artist whose sole purpose for being in business is to focus their time and energy exclusively on you for the duration of your stay with them?

The one plops your kids down on the “X”, says “say cheese”, and lets you choose from several notebook-size or smaller pictures that look like every other portrait of every other person you’ve ever seen, or the one who goes out of his (or her) way to photograph the unique individual that each of your kids is, and produces a beautifully crafted photograph worthy of a place of honor over the mantlepiece or the sofa, that you’ll want to hand down to future generations of your family?

One will cost you significantly more money than the other, and there is a time and a place for both (and everything in between). As a wise consumer, it is up to you to decide where on that trade-off continuum you want to buy, and that requires knowing what you’re getting for your money, not just in pieces of paper with pictures on them, but also in the level of dedication to craftsmanship and service that your photographer invests in their making.