Being arrested and charged with "child endangerment" for photographing his young daughter unclothed was just the beginning of the ordeal undergone by the amateur photographer (and his family) whose case I sketched in the last issue. Upon his arrest, subsequent to a local photo processing lab's turning negatives and contact sheets of a brief shooting session over the the police, his wife and three of his children were traumatized by the police swooping down on their home unannounced in the wee hours of the morning, dragging them out of bed and driving down to the local police station in their east-coast hometown, where they were then subjected to bizarre, lengthy interrogations involving abstruse concepts such as "good touch" and "bad touch," and inquiring into their belief in God or lack of it.

That was just for openers. Because the court was initially persuaded by the prosecution that he posed an ongoing danger to his children, this man was required to move out of his home for a period of two months and forbidden during that period to have any contact whatsoever with his devoted 6-year-old daughter -- radically disrupting what had been a close-knit, loving family environment. (The family pediatrician's evaluation is that the little girl about whom the system claimed to be so concerned suffered "not from the pictures, but from the arrest of her father and questioning by the police.")

As the story began to leak out, to the papers and the community, this man's social environment, not surprisingly, changed; long-term friendships and neighborly relations shifted, and in some cases ended abruptly. He and his loved ones were, in a nutshell, permanently stigmatized. The family was forced to expend an enormous amount of time, energy and money on his defense; not only that, but a year of their lives was consumed by this debacle.

The prosecutor's zeal never flagged, even as the case weakened; there's political gold in them thar hills of kiddie-porn witch-hunts. (Win or lose, you look like a righteous crusader protecting the innocent; and you can always blame a loss on someone else -- the courts or the jury.) Though the psychiatrist and social worker assigned by the court reported that there were no grounds for prosecution, the judge stood by the prosecutor, so the case dragged on, month after month.

Evidence that the grand jury which originally indicted the photographer had been deliberately misinformed by the prosecution surfaced: the prosecutor had deliberately withheld from that jury the information that this photographer was a serious amateur taking courses at the International Center of Photography, and that these images had come out of an assignment for his class. Gradually, artist's groups, including the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression, lent their support. The American Civil Liberties Union stepped in. I came on board as an expert witness for the defense. It became painfully clear to the court that the case was groundless, and an embarrassment.

So face had to be saved, and -- most importantly -- a suit for false arrest avoided. Finally, and only when it became apparent that the case was not winnable, "the prosecutor's office called the defense seeking a way to settle the case," according to a front-page story in the New York Times. "[The photographer's] attorney proposed a pretrial intervention program that could clear the father's name within six months," that account continues. "Privately, civil liberties attorneys called the turnaround a stunning defeat for the prosecution."

So, to put an end to this nightmare, the photographer chose to undergo a nominal dose of "counseling." In return, not only was the case dropped, but the arrest and prosecution will be expunged from the record. The slate, technically, will be clean. (Of course, the story, by now, has not only gone all over the family's home town, but has hit local tv stations as well as the front page of the Times.) He and his family can set about rebuilding their shattered lives.

In my role as expert witness, I spent some time studying the contact sheets of the three 36-exposure rolls of b&w film that touched off this hysteria -- the results of a 15-minute shooting session, under studio conditions, with a motorized Nikon, in the presence of the girl's mother and her nanny. The photographer, who thought so little of these pictures that he turned them in to a local camera store for processing, was arrested when he came to pick them up; so we'll never have any idea how he would have interpreted those negatives in print form, or if he would have found any of them to be of further interest.

As unresolved imagery, I found nothing deliberately sexual about them, and certainly nothing either intentionally or inadvertently arousing. (It's worth noting that the only people who found these pictures eroticizing were those in the legal system. Gives you pause, doesn't it?) In my view, they are hasty, affectionate, amused, playful glimpses of someone equally playful: an impish, ecstatic, innocent child who, as a result of their maker's photographic decisions, appears to be floating magically in space, looking like a cherub who is still, in Wordsworth's phrase, "trailing clouds of glory." Having visited, lectured at and taught in photo-education environments for the past twenty-five years, I saw nothing at all unusual or remarkable about any of them; in an art-photography context, they're typical student work. It is hard to imagine them costing a man his good reputation and a small fortune in legal fees, and disrupting a family's life for more than a year.

Yet this case is hardly unique. It is the second such case in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut area in which I've testified in recent years; I've provided informal advice and counsel in at least ten others across the country over the past decade. Many other such cases came to my attention as far back as the early 1980s, when I chaired the Committee on Censorship and Freedom of Vision of the Society for Photographic Education. Dozens more could be cited at this point

We need to be aware that this case, and its numerous parallels, cumulatively constitute a much larger, nation-wide pattern in which unsuspecting people who believe they've done nothing wrong by making images of a kind commonly found in family albums and prominent museums of art suddenly find themselves accused of one of the most heinous of crimes and fighting for their families' very lives. The cost to the police and judicial system of prosecuting these cases must be enormous; the costs to the families involved are not only financial but psychological, and the resulting devastation is incalculable.

These cases, which rarely make the national news, are being dealt with for the most part on a local basis, as isolated occurrences. Consequently, the larger pattern is not being observed, much less considered. The underlying issues, therefore, remain unaddressed. The court in this particular case was in a position to make a landmark decision that would spare countless families the trauma and indignity of being dragged through the judicial system because one or another family member has made photographs not unlike those in her parent's snapshot album, or similar to others that hang in the National Gallery of Art in our nation's capitol. Its benefit to the photographer and his family notwithstanding, the prosecution's eleventh-hour decision not to stick to its guns eliminated the possibility of a precedent-setting verdict that might have saved countless photographers, amateur and professional, from similar grief in the future.

In my opinion, the legal system has an obligation to understand that the production of visual images of unclothed adults and children in all media, not just photography, is an inevitable consequence of the spread of photography-education and art-education systems throughout this culture. Every poll on that subject -- e.g., the most recent Louis Harris Organization poll on the arts and culture in the U.S. -- indicates that more and more Americans are taking art-making courses every day, and believe that the ability to take such courses, to make their own artworks, and thereby to develop their own creative capacities, is a fundamental right of citizenship in a democracy.

We are, in short, rapidly becoming a nation of part-time artists. Photography is certainly the most popular and accessible medium in which we in the U.S. produce this mounting volume of amateur visual art. The simple fact is that artists in all media -- particularly fledgling artists -- make art about their daily lives and their loved ones. And it is high time for the judicial system to affirm that the citizenry has the right to make art -- good art, bad art, student art -- based on intimate life, and that photography is no less an acceptable medium for such art than any other. For, in part, this case reflects a distinct prejudice against photography within the legal system. Surely there can be no doubt that had this child spent the same fifteen minutes naked and her father had sculpted her, painted her, sketched her in pencil, written a poem or composed a song about what he saw, none of this uproar would have ensued.

What we have in this recent case, and in the innumerable parallel instances, is a situation in which a branch of the nation's educational system and its fine-arts presentational network are clearly out of synch with a branch of the law-enforcement system. It is the position of this writer, and of many of his peers and colleagues in the field, that this troublesome issue must be resolved by dialogue between the two conflicting systems and a reconsideration of the legislation concerning child nudity in images, rather than by punishment of individuals like the amateur photographer I've described, who, taking one system at its word and finding themselves penalized and traumatized for it by the other, have in effect been, and have every right to feel, betrayed by both.