Forbidden art?
The exclusive topic of Christian Kaiser and Corinna Engel’s photos is young girls, naked and abandoned, caught between drugs, sex, violence, prostitution, and neglect. They depict how people become toys, sex-dolls, weak-willed, at the mercy of their addiction, and yet full of a tender beauty, people torn between feelings of being unaccepted and unloved, feeling annoyed. Heroin Kids tells us about a free and wild way of life lived on the brink of self-destruction – a photo-book full of yearning.
Organisations for the protection of youth are outraged! There have been repeated attempts to stop work on the photo-book, and massive pressure has been asserted on the artists – punitive fines have been amerced, their website has been threatened with ban and blockage. The ‘Kommission für Jugendmedienschutz’ (KJM; Commission for Youth Media Protection) is considering whether human dignity has been violated, the ‘Bayerische Landeszentrale für Neue Medien’ (BLM; Bavarian Central Office for New Media) is referring to contents that are “socio-ethically disorientating and harmful to minors” and that are “in blatant contrast to values and norms generally acknowledged in our society.”
Jugendschutz.net views Heroin Kids as a degradation of young women to sexual objects without any will of their own. A report on this photo series in German magazine Focus was entitled “forbidden art.”
216 pages broadsheet (28˙28 cm), hardcover, DVD ca. 49 minutes
