Brooke shields 1978 playboy
Posts about Brooke Shields written by S.Za.
Prince, Schorr tells me, has never met Shields. Intent on questioning notions of authorship and originality, he rephotographed an existing image that had already inspired two years of legal debate. The original picture, for which Shields was paid $450, was taken by fashion photographer Garry Gross in 1975 for a Playboy publication titled Sugar and Spice. It was one of a dozen images of Shields designed, according to Gross, to reveal the not-so-latent sexuality of the prepubescent child.
Though the pictures were taken with her consent, in 1981 Shields’s mother sued Gross on the grounds that his continuing sale of them was damaging to her daughter’s reputation, and she obtained a provisional ban on their further use. By then Shields, who began modelling at 11 months, had achieved national notoriety: she starred as a child prostitute in Louis Malle’s 1978 film Pretty Baby, which included a scene in which her virginity is auctioned, and in 1980 she starred in Richard Avedon’s provocative advertising campaign for Calvin Klein Jeans.
“Brooke Shields didn’t have a problem making that picture,” Schorr says, “because she was playacting in front of the camera and that’s what she does. I don’t think she ever felt like she was a victim of his camera, I think she felt like she was a victim of his greed, and to some extent a victim of her mother’s poor judgment. I think she was happy when Richard took the picture and made something of it because it was a big fuck you to Garry Gross.”
In July 1978, at the age of thirteen, Brooke Shields made front page news in Photo Magazine. The young American film prodigy was promoting the film Pretty Baby directed by Louis Malle. In the magazine, a ten-year old Brooke is shown wearing makeup, her glistening body posed naked in a bathtub. The picture comes from
In 1981, however, Brooke Shields wanted to prevent further use of these pictures and tried unsuccessfully to buy back the negatives. A legal battle then began between Shields and Gross with Gross being sued for a million dollars. Brooke Shields claimed that her mother had agreed to give up her rights for one publication only and that the photographs caused her embarrassment. In addition, they had been published, and would probably be published again, in revues of dubious morality. Her lawyers immediately obtained a provisional measure forbidding the use of the pictures until the end of the trial. The case was won by Gross with the court considering the contract signed by Brooke Shields’ mother to be valid and binding on her daughter. Brooke Shields appealed and once again obtained a provisional ban on the use of the photographs.
Finally, after a procedure lasting for two years, the appeal court confirmed that Brooke could not invoke her right to annul the contract and that she was legally bound by her mother’s signature. The court once again reaffirmed Gross’s right to freely exploit the use of the pictures other than in a pornographic context. After the failure of their arguments concerning the validity of the contract, Brooke’s lawyers decided on a new strategy, attacking Gross for violation of Brooke Shields’ privacy. The actress claimed that the publication of the images caused her distress and embarrassment. Brooke Shields’ acting career, however, weakened the credibility of this argument since it had clearly been built by projecting an explicitly sexual image of herself. Whatever the case, the court considered that “these photographs are not sexually suggestive, provocative or pornographic, nor do they imply sexual promiscuity. They are pictures of a prepubescent girl posing innocently in her bath”. The court rejected all Brooke Shields’ claims and decided in Gross’s favour. The trial however, had ruined him financially and had tarnished his reputation. In addition, a change in attitudes towards the “politically correct” had sullied the photographs.
The story, nevertheless, had an unexpected development. In 1992, a contemporary artist called Richard Prince approached Gross about buying the rights to use and reproduce the image of Brooke Shields. In his artistic work, Prince appropriates pictures by rephotographing them, recontextualizing them and giving them a title. The picture of Brooke Shields, for example, is entitled Spiritual America. Gross was willing to retrocede his rights to Prince for a series of ten prints. Prince became a star of the contemporary art scene and his picture was sold at Christies in 1999 for $151,000.
Brooke Shields grew up quite sane and balanced considering all the weird sexualised stuff she was made to do when she was young.
Although the film was mostly praised by critics, it caused significant controversy due to its depiction of child prostitution and the nude scenes of Brooke Shields,
Brooke Shields is no stranger to controversy.
