To bring his project to life, Gross hired a 10-year-old model from the prestigious Ford modeling agency: a young Brooke Shields. With the full consent and signed contract of her mother and manager, Teri Shields, the photoshoot took place in 1975. Teri Shields and her daughter received a total of $450 for the session.
Searching for today yields a battlefield of opinions:
: Shields’ mother and manager, Teri Shields, fully consented to the session, signing two unrestricted release forms and receiving a $450 fee. garry gross the woman in the child better
As Brooke Shields's fame skyrocketed, in part due to her role as a child prostitute in Louis Malle's 1978 film Pretty Baby , she sought to distance herself from Gross's photographs. At 17 years old, she initiated a lawsuit to block any further use of the images, arguing that they were an invasion of her privacy and a source of great embarrassment.
Instead, we called it art — the way a lock calls a thief resourceful. To bring his project to life, Gross hired
Yet the moral case against the photographs is overwhelming to many observers. The Frieze critic Ronald Jones, reviewing a 1999 Gross exhibition, argued that the photographer’s own statements revealed a disturbing mind‑set. By openly discussing his “arousal” response to a four‑year‑old’s “flirtatiousness,” Gross made it impossible to claim that the images were innocent or merely anthropological. “Gross’s motives, if taken seriously,” Jones wrote, “carr[y] us along a perilous and precarious edge”.
Moreover, the phrase has been reclaimed by critics. Today, photographers do it better by not doing it at all . The best portrait of a 10-year-old girl respects her childhood, does not hasten her into adult sexuality, and certainly does not publish her nude for profit. Searching for today yields a battlefield of opinions:
The resulting images—Brooke standing in a bathtub, Brooke oiled and posed in a full-length fur coat, and the most infamous shot of Brooke nude in a sauna—were not initially illegal. Gross argued he was capturing the "precocious essence" of budding womanhood. His working thesis was that there is a woman trapped inside a child , and his job as an artist was to bring that woman "out better."
At first, the images were published without major incident. But everything changed when the young model in the photos became the world-famous star of Pretty Baby and The Blue Lagoon . Seeing her childhood image now tied to her celebrity, a 17-year-old Brooke Shields sought to regain control.
The photographs might have remained a footnote in 1970s erotic art photography had Shields not become a global superstar. By 1981, at age 15, she starred in Calvin Klein jeans ads (“Nothing comes between me and my Calvins”) and films like Pretty Baby (where she played a child prostitute). That year, her mother, Teri Shields, tried to buy back the negatives from Gross to prevent further distribution. Gross refused. A legal battle ensued, and a New York judge ruled that Gross owned the images, though they could not be used for commercial purposes (e.g., advertising) without Brooke’s consent.