![]() ![]() The judge concurred and, while praising the pictures’ “sultry, sensual appeal”, ruled that Gross was not a pornographer: “They have no erotic appeal except to possibly perverse minds.” That decision was overturned by an appeals court, but in 1983 the original verdict in Gross’s favour was upheld. Gross’s lawyers argued that his photographs could not further damage Shields’s reputation because, since they were taken, she had made a profitable career “as a young vamp and a harlot, a seasoned sexual veteran, a provocative child-woman, an erotic and sensual sex symbol, the Lolita of her generation”. “You know what comes between me and my Calvins?” the 15-year-old Shields asked in one ad, which was censored by American TV networks, “Nothing!” By then Shields, who began modelling at 11 months, had achieved national notoriety: she starred as a child prostitute in Louis Malle’s 1978 film Pretty Baby, which included a scene in which her virginity is auctioned, and in 1980 she starred in Richard Avedon’s provocative advertising campaign for Calvin Klein Jeans. ![]() Though the pictures were taken with her consent, in 1981 Shields’s mother sued Gross on the grounds that his continuing sale of them was damaging to her daughter’s reputation, and she obtained a provisional ban on their further use. It was one of a dozen images of Shields designed, according to Gross, to reveal the not-so-latent sexuality of the prepubescent child. The original picture, for which Shields was paid $450, was taken by fashion photographer Garry Gross in 1975 for a Playboy publication titled Sugar and Spice. Intent on questioning notions of authorship and originality, he rephotographed an existing image that had already inspired two years of legal debate. ![]() Prince, Schorr tells me, has never met Shields. It tells you everything about what we fear and desire.” “I found it really disturbing, but my impression always was that Richard made the piece because it was disturbing. “I always thought that it was a perverse picture,” says Schorr, who has since made a documentary about Prince, and befriended Shields when she photographed the actor/model last year for Interview magazine. When artist Collier Schorr sublet Prince’s studio in the 1980s, the photograph was hanging in the hallway. ![]()
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