The great jury of the county of Tarrant, in Texas, decided not to continue the Museum of Modern Art of Fort Worth after the seizure of five works by Sally Mann (born in 1951) in January 2025. These works, exhibited in the exhibition “Diaries of Home”, had been judged inappropriate by the local authorities, which had described them as “pedocriminals” because of the representation of naked children. “Children’s images are deeply shocking. The sexual exploitation of a minor, including under cover of art, should never be tolerated ” had indignant Tim O’Hare on X, judge of the County of Tarrant.
This seizure had been widely criticized by the national coalition against censorship, which denounced an attack on artistic freedom and the risk of erroneous interpretation of children’s nudity in art.
One of the photographs of Sally Mann withdrawn from the exhibition: The Perfect Tomato1990, ed. 25, 20.4 × 25.5 cm.
© Sally Mann
Despite the abandonment of the prosecution, the fate of the photographs seized of Sally Mann remains uncertain. The exhibition has been prematurely fenced.
Largely published and exhibited, the photographs of Sally Mann, which depict rural childhood, and especially those of her children in the state of Virginia in the 1980s, often represented naked, have frequently been the subject of controversy. In 2015, the artist responded to these criticisms in an article in New York Timesexplaining that the images representing children had too often been interpreted distorted, nudity being systematically confused with sexuality.
