Complaints force gallery to close show

A fashionable London art gallery has closed after receiving complaints about an exhibition featuring photographs of an artist's naked daughter.

Scotland Yard was alerted after visitors to the exhibition at the Spitz gallery complained that they considered the images - which show the girl as a baby, a toddler and a five-year-old - as being pornographic.

Specialist police officers were today visiting the gallery at Spitalfields Market to decide whether the exhibition, which opened yesterday, is obscene.

The gallery doors were closed last night and the windows covered with bin-liners and cloth while managers took advice from police over whether the images could be considered obscene.

The artist, Betsy Schneider, said she was amazed. "The aim of these pictures is not to provoke or shock," she said. "The idea is to show time, change and growth."

The furore echoes that which surrounded another American photographer, whose images of her naked children caused a stir in 2001. Police threatened to seize three of Tierney Gearon's pictures from the Saatchi gallery in London.

Then, the culture minister, Chris Smith, intervened to rebuke officers for overstepping the boundary between probity and censorship. The Crown Prosecution-Service decided not to go to court despite strong protests from the police.

Schneider's piece, exhibited as part of a festival celebrating women's writing which was opened by comedian Jo Brand, is made up of three large blocks of pictures, each of which shows 63 images of her daughter Madeleine.

One block shows the child aged nine weeks, while in the second she is two and a half. In the third, which caused offence, she is five. Most of the images show Madeleine completely naked, although she does wear clothes in a few. She is photographed standing up and looking straight into the camera.

The pictures, which resemble home snaps, show the girl stood in front of a pine cupboard or a radiator.

Ms Schneider accepts that in some of the photographs her daughter is posing in a fashion which might be considered pornographic if viewed in isolation. But she denies that the work seen as a whole could be interpreted as obscene.

The artist expressed concern that someone had photographed her work in the gallery.

She said: "I cannot chase any pictures that might have been taken and I cannot chase what people might read into them. When you decide to exhibit your work you're deciding to put it out there ... once you show them you have to let go."

The artist, a mother of two who has embarked on a similar project documenting the growth of her two-year-old son Viktor, said she had chosen to exhibit in London because of the support she had received.

"My husband, friends, parents and family believe in it, and I really believe I am not damaging them by doing this," she said.

Schneider, who calls herself a photographic artist, is assistant professor of art at Arizona State University.

Writing on her website, she says: "I wanted to show how the body changes over time. I also wanted to record the incidental changes which happen day to day: their cuts and bruises, dirt, drawings on themselves, temporary tattoos, tans and sunburns. With clothes on, the work would have been more about what they wore each day, I am more interested in what their bodies look like each day."