When I was a kid I was heavily into photography. I remember at a very young age I had a small “box brownie” camera that took about 12 photos on a roll of black & white film, and we had to send the roll away to get it processed. By the time I was about 8 or 9 years old, my father had given me a Halina 35mm camera that took proper film, and I started shooting colour instead of black & white.

Photography back then was something you took your time over. A roll of film had 12, 24, or 36 shots on it, and that was it. There was no “undo” feature; once the frame was exposed there was no way to un-expose it, so you took your time over every shot. And of course it cost money to get the film developed and printed, so you tried not to waste anything.

When I reached about 11 or 12 I discovered that you could develop your own black & white film for a fraction of the cost of working in colour, and so I set up a small darkroom in the loft area alongside my bedroom and began to develop and print in there. At the time my first love was wildlife and nature photography. I would lay around on cliffs and in woodlands for ages trying to get photographs of birds and animals like I had seen in magazines and on television, but my equipment was not quite up to it. Professional wildlife photographers use long and fast lenses that I simply could not afford, and so I started to look for other things to put in front of my lens.

There were a few of us back then who were into photography and although we never really met up and went out as a group with our cameras, we did get together occasionally in twos and photograph each other or our friends. And this is where in retrospect it becomes a little complicated, as – if you have read some of the earlier posts on this blog – you will know that some of my friends and I were pretty unbothered about nudity at that time. And so from the age of about 15 until we left school at 18, quite a few of the photos we took were nudes of each other or of ourselves, either in “home studio” setups in our rooms, or outside in the gardens or the countryside.

Informed Consent

Why nudes though? Why not keep our clothes on when the cameras were around? Simply because most of us never really thought of nudity as anything unusual, and although we had not seen much nude photography ourselves (no internet, remember) we knew that artists tended to paint or draw nudes, and just kind of assumed that was the way to do things. No-one suggested it to us; no-one coerced us; and to the best of my knowledge no-one outside of our group was even aware that we were doing it.

At the time we never even considered that this might be anything problematic. We took the photos, printed them (or had them printed at a lab if they were in colour), and shared the prints around amongst each other. There was no thought about keeping them secret or hidden, and – although I cannot speak for everyone – I know that some (most?) of us would not have cared who saw them or where they ended up.

But of course we were under 18, and the law is pretty clear that no-one under 18 can give informed consent for the taking of nude photographs. We did not know that at the time of course (although I do wonder if we would have cared even if we had known) and as far as we were concerned all we were doing was practicing our photography and having a bit of fun, but many years later when I thought back to those times I realised that legally what we were doing was a serious issue. I have no idea how the law would have viewed our specific situation since all of us were minors and there were no outside influencers involved at all, but I do suspect that if it had come out then our parents would have got into trouble for “letting us” take the photographs in the first place. Although given that this was the ’80s and we were all pretty much free-range there was no way they would even have known about it, let alone been able to stop us.

Rediscovery

This was, however, all just a theoretical problem, as there was nothing I could do about what had happened when we were at school. But then one day many years later I was sorting through some old boxes of stuff that had been left at my parents’ house and I found a stack of prints that I had made when I was at school. About half of them were landscapes and photos taken locally or around the school buildings, but the rest were nudes, mostly of me taken by myself or one of the others, and a few were of my friends.

For a while I was really pleased to find them as they were a great memory of my last few years at school. Life was uncomplicated back then, and it was lovely to have that visual record of summers in the garden discovering our artistic expression and not caring if what we did would be considered “normal” by anyone else. We were having fun, we were hurting no-one, and it made us happy.

But then I realised that I now had an actual non-theoretical problem. Even owning some of these photos was technically a crime as I was an adult and the people in the photos were definitely not. I suspect that there would have been no real issue with the photographs of myself, although I do wonder if anyone would have believed that we were taking selfies with home-made self timers back then and gone looking for a non-existent coercive photographer. But the photos of my friends were a complete no-no.

I kept them for a couple of weeks, and then decided that the safest way to handle them was to throw them away. The internet was just becoming a thing and I knew that if I had kept them I would have eventually wanted to post the selfies online somewhere, telling myself that “nothing can possibly go wrong” and then finding myself in trouble with the law. I knew that at the time of taking them I had known what I was doing and understood the “risks” (if that is the right word), and I knew that my opinion had not changed with time. But legally there is very little grey in this. Either you can give informed consent, or you cannot. So reluctantly I packed them up and put them in the bin.

More Common Than I Thought

For years I wondered if we were the only teenage group to take casual arty nude photos amongst ourselves like that. It’s not something you get to talk about often, and discussion in the media is always about the coercive, dark, and damaging aspects of teenage photography. But over time I have heard stories and seen things and realised that this is far less uncommon than we might expect. Kids are taking nude photos of each other all the time, and often the subject matter is far more sexual than anything we ever did. Everyone has a camera these days (that was something my old photography teacher definitely got wrong!) and even if you only consider strictly consensual and well informed (in the moral if not legal sense) photography there is a lot of it out there that has been taken by minors of their peers without influence from any adult.

And in any discussion about the appropriateness or otherwise of online spaces for minors and how technology can influence and affect the lives of kids as they grow up, this is never even considered.

Online Safety

This month the UK has implemented a very badly thought out “Online Safety Bill” requiring age verification on a whole swathe of websites and material, with the intent to “protect minors” from content deemed inappropriate for them to see. Whilst the stated aim of this may be laudable, the way it has been implemented is flawed and damaging, and does very little to protect anyone from anything. It is easily circumvented and the law of unintended consequences means that some things that should absolutely be available to minors such as art and health information are now behind age-verification walls.

But probably the biggest issue is that kids are creative, arguably the most creative demographic of all. Give a kid a camera and they will photograph things that interest them. Let kids mix and they will photograph each other. Kids write stories and fantasise about stuff that would make a regulator’s toes curl, and regardless of any “online safety” legislation they will find a way to get their stuff online. If there had been an internet when I was a kid I can guarantee that we would have been sharing photos on whatever platform we could find and kids these days are no different. Some will understand the risks and some will not. Some will be doing it because they really want to, and some will do it just to be like their friends. But kids will share photos and some of those photos will be very similar in content to the material that the “Online Safety” bill is intended to protect them from.

Despite what governments might think, the route to online safety is not regulation but education.

• Teach kids about the risks of posting content at an early age and get them to understand what might come back on them and cause a problem years down the line.
• Educate adults about how to set up the existing online protections on routers and computers to limit what kids can see.
• Encourage families to have a more hands-on idea of parenting so kids feel supported online rather than left to get on with it.

And above all educate society to understand that not all nudity is sexual, and to stop punishing people for daring to have a body and being fine with people seeing it.