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The Henson photographs and the ‘network condition’

Like most academics who teach in an art school in Australia, the debate roused by the circulation and legal ‘capture’ of images of nude teenagers by Bill Henson in May 2008 provided me with a good opportunity for extensive classroom discussion. Although I neither teach nor research in the area of photography, I am keenly interested in and alert to contemporary visual culture, especially when this concerns matters connected to the circulation and governance of images on the Internet. Two of my graduate students used the incident of the police seizure of the photographs from the RoslynOxley9 Gallery in Sydney on Wednesday 21 May 2008 to investigate what they called ‘the network effect’. They convincingly argued that Henson’s art-photography image of a nude 12-year-old girl had effectively become a network ‘meme’. The concept of the cultural meme has been expounded through the work of the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and expanded to a more extensive theory of cultural production by Susan Blackmore. A meme is typically understood to be a rapidly replicating transfer of ideas, behaviours or skills from person to person, more typically taking hold across populations. This concept became fashionable within cyberculture during the 1990s, where many believed that developing technologies and media such as the Internet facilitated memetic spread and uptake not only of ideas but also rich media such as digital images, sound, movies and so on. According to my students, Henson’s image of the 12-year-old girl and the story of its seizure spread memetically and infected the ‘hosts’ of various global media outlets like the front page of the UK Sun’s online site, a medical portal in India as well as every free-to-air radio and television network in Australia. They observed, cannily, that the image’s memetic propensities could be attributed to both its technical status and its iconographic qualities. On thousands of online and offline media hosts, Henson’s image was republished and framed, sometimes decried, as child pornography. Its pornographic status was often acquired by being visually marked with the censor’s tools of a ‘black stripe’ across the subject’s eyes and by pixellating the girl’s breast and genital areas when reproduced for print and broadcast media. In spite of its decreed status as child pornography, this image nonetheless replicated at a frightening global pace assisted by its original uncensored upload to the gallery’s website as part of the promotion for the show’s impending opening. The technical status of the image as a digital online image thus allowed for its rapid replication and dissemination. Combined with its iconographic nature – the photographic depiction of an actual nude 12-year-old subject and all that this is fast coming to denote in Australia as the very inculcation of child porn – meant there was no stopping that wildfire replication. This, my students stated, was a prime example of how contemporary images are now