During the mid to late '70s, as a photography professor at Cornell University, I was scorned by my friends, accused of child pornography and fired from my teaching job after exhibiting photographs of my son, my husband and my fatherinlaw in the nude. I showed closeups of the older men's penises and testicles, my husband with an erection, and my son in a moment of natural childlike selfexploration. The chair of the art faculty (a faculty of one woman and fourteen men“one of whom did nothing but nude sculptures of late pubescent women with such realism that one could easily identify the model) told me that I could not photograph male genitalia and expect to stay at Cornell.
"Probably most offensive," according to writer Carol Jacobsen in her article "Redefining Censorship; A Feminist View" in the Winter 1991 issue of Art Journal, "was Livingston's perceived social breach of the motherhood role, for she broke silence on some carefully guarded secrets about childhood sexuality with her images of joyful child nudity and masturbation."
Friends of mine who teach anthropology at Cornell agree with Jacobsen but contend that it is also the images of my fatherinlaw nude in his seventies that offend many. Revealing sexuality of the young as well as the old is taboo in our culture.
Melody Davis writes about these photographs in her book, The Male Nude in Contemporary Photography, saying they are "highly charged“intellectually and photographically... and quite beautiful." And, bless her heart, she adds, "The photographer [meaning me] deserves far more attention than she has received."
The photographs of my son Sam caused such a stir that I was investigated by the Department of Social Services for alleged child abuse, after the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children charged me with producing kiddie porn. The charges were later dropped.
Because I was raised in a family where my sexuality was repressed (as most of us were), I thought touching one's genitalia was something that occurred in teen years. As a new parent, I learned differently. Sometime in Sam's first week, when I was changing his diapers, his hands went to his genitals. My first impulse was to brush his hands aside, but I hesitated long enough to realize that here was an important decision“to be free or not to be free, that is the question.
I envisioned thousands of parents repeatedly pulling their babies' hands away, slapping them, or spanking“whatever it took to teach them that the area between their legs is forbidden territory. I had grown up thinking/feeling it was a dark and dirty business down there. My mother was undoubtedly responsible. She must have pulled my hand away from my sex hundreds of times. I wasn't going to make the same mistake.
I refused to interfere with my son's innocent beginnings of sexual development. Instead, I smiled at his childish playfulness. I wanted him to be able to do and think what he wanted, particularly concerning his own body. At the age of six he was still comfortable fondling his genitals in the presence of his parents. This childish delight I captured only once in a series of nine shots taken during a nude photo session with him.
Sam has always been proud of the photographs I've made of him. As a teenager, he repeatedly pulled out my entire portfolio, sharing it with his friends. In a few months, Sam will be 25“the age I was when he was born. We have come full circle; he is busy supporting himself as an artist and raising his own son to follow the path of freedom.
Wilhelm Reich's book The Mass Psychology of Fascism influenced my thinking about child rearing. According to Reich, being raised in sexual freedom (i.e. masturbation is healthy, premarital sex and sex education are a person's human right) is the first step in structuring personalities who will not follow authority. Most contemporary sociology books used in college courses today support Reich's ideas, particularly that masturbation is healthy.
Shortly after the "kiddie porn" charges were dropped, I became part of a large classaction sex discrimination lawsuit against Cornell. We were in court from 1980 to l985 in what seemed like endless years of litigation. We met every Saturday morning for at least three hours to plan fundraising and help our one lawyer with all the paper work. We were buried in paper work, a popular counter attack in this type of case. Cornell hired the second largest law firm in Washington, D.C. and spent 2.5 million dollars while we struggled to raise $100,000 for our lawyer“a real David and Goliath battle.
The Federal District Judge hearing our case consistently ruled against us regardless of our sound evidence. This injustice, together with the direct experiences of abuse each woman had encountered while teaching at Cornell, eventually convinced me (and the other 36 women) to settle out of court for $250,000“a small sum when divided amongst so many plaintiffs and our attorneys. Some things changed at Cornell“salary inequity for women and the grievance procedure. But there are still approximately 1087 tenured men and 178 tenured women faculty. I never got my job back.
My teaching at Cornell ended in the Summer of 1978. By October 1979, I had selfpublished at my own expense a series of 14 posters with over 200 photographic images that included all the controversial photographs that had cost me my teaching position at Cornell. These photographs tell a story of my family, a story of male bonding in three generations“my son, his father, and his grandfather. The images of all three show a softness and warmth which suggest to viewers that males of all ages, the youngest to the eldest, have sexuality full of innocence, grace and beauty. The posters are full of wit and humor.
I mailed 300 sets of these 14 posters to museums, galleries, critics, and artists, asking them to hang them as an exhibition for one month. As a result, I had many shows of these posters across the country. Some were successful, while others were sagas of fighting censors.
I ran ads to sell the remaining 700 sets. Magazines like Art News, Art in America, Ms., Playgirl, and Chrysalis refused to publish my ads because they showed male genitalia. I compromised and chose photographs without genitalia for the ads. Only Women Artist's News and Exposure (a publication of the Society of Photographic Education) printed my ads uncensored, i.e. without cropping out the genitals.
Jonathan Green, in his 1984 publication American Photography; A Critical History 1945 to Present, describes the posters as bucking a variety of traditions by exploring male sexuality: "Livingston's photographs reverse, or at least equalize, the usual relationship of male dominance and female submission; they also invert the method of traditional extended portrait, in which the male photographer focuses on the nude female." The work "remains one of the major confrontational efforts of the seventies... The strength of their sociopolitical impact may be gauged by the fact that two major art periodicals, Art in America and Art News, refused to advertise the posters because they showed the penis."
In 198283, I opened "Jacqueline Livingston“A One Artist Gallery" (on Prince Street between Broadway and West Broadway, around the corner from Costelli's) as a year's project to exhibit my photography with a different show monthly in Soho“the heart of New York City's artist district“and to have on display throughout the year the series of 14 posters of my family, to further confront a system that continued to censor my work.
The FBI appeared, wanting to know how I could exhibit the photos of my son since the new "kiddie porn" law had just passed. I explained that the law has the flexibility to allow that images of nude children may be considered art; not every nude of a child is pornography. I explaimed that my photographs were certainly artwork, that the posters were already in the collections of major museums including the Metropolitan and the Museums of Modern Art in New York and San Francisco. (Not that that should have to be a criteria in determining freedom of expression.) Mostly they left me alone, but they were in and out of the gallery all year.
On permanent display in the gallery's street level window was an enormous photocopied blowup of Howard Smith's interview with me in his Village Voice column of October 1979. People were interested. Some told me I was the "hottest" artist to hit Soho in years. Others called me "Queen" of Soho.
I was in the gallery every day to greet people and answer their questions. I talked about the 14 posters endlessly, walking people through the private moments of my family life. My downtoearth straightforwardness caused one man to comment, "From the display of nude pictures in the window, I came in this gallery expecting to meet Mae West, and what do I get instead, Lily Tomlin." We sat down, and talked for hours.
The unending conflicts in presenting my work, compounded by the colossal walls of indifference from the art world, my ouster from academic teaching, and the financial strain of the 14 poster project, followed by the Soho gallery project, left me emotionally drained and near bankruptcy. No one funded my work. These projects were paid for on my credit cards and by refinancing my home.
My intents were questioned when I was accused of child abuse (as I mentioned earlier), and I received hostile phone calls about my photography. It was so upsetting that I had to unlist my phone number. I thought I had escaped unscarred, but had I?
Increasingly over the past six years a dark cloud descended. I became more and more reticent about my art. Was it, as A.D. Coleman, founder of a special committee in 1982 to investigate censorship of photographers, says: "They (the censored artists) will very often turn away from the subject matter, stop showing that particular body of work and frequently doubt themselves, question their own motives, and be suspicious of themselves ... their image of themselves as a good person is suddenly and dramatically and publicly undermined."
During this same time, I applied for teaching jobs in academe but it was hopeless. Even though colleagues argued for my hire, other faculty so opposed me that it was impossible. "If the institutions of higher education in this great land of freedom won't support me and my artwork," I thought, "What chance do I (we) have?" This refrain echoed deep inside me. I held it, literally, tightly to my bosom. Painfully, I watched my spirit dissipate; hopelessness led to helplessness.
My life became filled with despair as I stuck to jobs I hated“jobs that used only a fraction of my talents, and left me exhausted at the end of a shift, too tired to do much else. I continued to photograph my family, my son in his teenage years, later as he became a young adult, and most recently a father with his own son. I never stopped photographing, but I ceased to give voice to my images.
I held inside myself the voice that my photographs demanded. I knew I must write the autobiographical text to accompany them, to produce a book of my photography, but I didn't do it. I was no longer the triumphant veteran of censorship. I had permitted myself to be silenced, plastered up, sealed, submerged.
When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in October 1992, I knew with certainty, even before reading any of the numerous books written on the topic, that my cancer was caused by silence, and that I could not heal myself, for there are no sure cures, without radically changing my life. My cancer is the raging growth erupted from everything that had been suppressed that had not been spoken and shown. I know that I must speak, to show my photography, to frame its political discourse by discussing the context in which it was made. To again become an artist and teacher.
I know I am fighting the odds. Cancer is fed by many sources: emotional (loss, grief, depression); environmental (food in the standard American diet, polluted air and water, and radiation); and social (breakdowns in social, family, and business relationships). Cancer is the disease of this culture. It is this century's Black Plague. One third of America's men and women will develop cancer (one in eight American women will have breast cancer). Of those who develop cancer, roughly twothirds will die within the first five years afer diagnosis.
Modern medicine has made no advancement toward cure for the past fifty years despite lip service paid to early detection. (Early detection only serves to boost their survival statistics since living five years beyond diagnosis is considered "cured.") Little effort is put into prevention even though a lowfat, highcarbohydrate, highfiber diet has proven effective (see The Cancer Prevention Diet, 1993, ed. by Michio Kushi, and A Challenging Second Opinion by John McDougall, M.D.).
In fact, the American Medical Association, the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute all spend a great deal of money suppressing any cure put forth other than surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Maintaining the status quo supports more people with jobs than have the disease. Many speculate that if the doors to these so called "cures" were stopped, the medical profession would close.
What are my hopes? At this point, I have not chosen surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy as part of my healing treatment. I am eating a macrobiotic diet (whole grains, vegetables, beans, sea vegetables“no meat, dairy, sugar or processed foods) designed to starve my cancer and build up my immune system. I walk daily, meditate, do visualizations, and work with a number of therapists doing physical therapy, bioenergetics, Jungian psychoanalysis, hypnosis, Traeger, chiropractics, acupuncture, Chinese herbs, and ancient Martial Arts movements used for healing. My focus has turned inward, toward my Higher Self.
I quit the job I hated; I'm making my art and writing again. As has always been the case with my art, my hope is that in addressing the personal, the universal emerges, and now in healing my own lifethreatening illness I might help others heal, help our culture and our planet heal.