Artist as Prisoner

On the other hand, Danesh admired Bobb's experience, knowledge, and generosity (Bobb cooked meals for Danesh when the young student was scraping for cash). And he was amused by the artist's daily "uniform" of geometric eyeglass frames, oversize collared shirts, straight-leg jeans, and Adidas sneakers. All the same, Bobb was difficult to understand. After a few drinks at a Miami Art Museum opening, Danesh recalls, Bobb turned to him and reflected on his long career. "He said there's no point to life," Danesh remembers. "It's just chaos, and art makes no sense of it. It's just something to occupy your time."

Twenty-five years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court placed child porn beyond First Amendment protection, stating that such material is "intrinsically related to the sexual abuse of children" and its prohibition a "legitimate reach" of the law. In the years since, sentences have grown more severe and judges less willing to hear defenses based on artistic expression, scholarly research, or journalism. "Possession of child pornography is illegal regardless of motive," says Rick Louis, spokesman for the Web-based Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection. "Even if someone seeks out and downloads [child porn] for the sole and specific purpose of reporting it to law enforcement, they are still breaking the law. Therefore anyone who pursues illegal material even for purposes of art or research should consider the terrible risk of being labeled a pedophile."

That label has stalked more than a few artists in the years since the Supreme Court's landmark ruling on child pornography. In one prominent case, FBI agents in 1990 raided the San Francisco studio of internationally acclaimed photographer Jock Sturges, seizing equipment, negatives, and photographs he had taken of nudist families. Sturges was never indicted, but he ran up a hefty legal bill during the fifteen-month investigation. Grand juries in Alabama and Tennessee did, however, indict Barnes & Noble on child pornography and obscene materials counts for selling Sturges's book Radiant Identities. The chain reached a deal with Tennessee authorities to display the book in blinder racks above children's eye level. The Alabama case was dismissed on a technicality.

In another oft-cited case, Detroit police raided the house of Marilyn Zimmerman, a photography professor at Wayne State University. They had been tipped off by a janitor claiming that a contact sheet containing images of Zimmerman's three-year-old daughter in the bathtub "looked like porn" to him. The prosecutor's investigation ended after a nationwide response from colleagues, curators, and scholars attested to Zimmerman's significance as an American artist and educator, and to the historical context for works of art that have shown nudes, including children.

Perhaps the most famous recent case involved Pete Townshend, guitarist for British supergroup The Who. Townshend's arrest in January 2003 came after he admitted downloading child porn while researching a memoir about his own abuse as a juvenile. He was cleared four months later, following a lengthy police investigation by Scotland Yard, although his name remained on a national sex offender register. A year ago on his Website, www.petetownshend-whohe.blogspot.com, Townshend wrote, "On the issue of child abuse, the climate in the press, the police, and in government in the UK at the moment is one of a witch hunt."

In the United States, child pornography is defined under federal law as the visual depiction of minors "engaged in a sex act" or the "lascivious depictions of [a minor's] genitals." In the past few years, thousands of Americans have been tried in child pornography cases. The level and intensity of the prosecutions reflects society's "growing anxiety" about child abuse and more frequent news stories about sexual predators, according to Marjorie Heins, founder and director of the Free Expression Policy Project at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. "It becomes very hard to have a coherent conversation about it without temperatures rising."

In Miami, U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta has made clear his intention to prioritize the prosecution of pornographers. Meeting with FBI supervisors in 2005, the then-interim U.S. Attorney surprised some by placing smut of all kinds toward the top of his enforcement list.

Soon after Bobb's arrest, his lawyers began pondering a defense based on freedom of expression. They felt it might apply in this case because of his long, law-abiding history in the community and his boundary-testing experimentation. They repeatedly mentioned his artistic work during plea negotiations. "Edward Bobb is not the person this law was created for," Horstman says. "His purpose was not to harm anybody, but actually to create more of a social awareness about the issue."