Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty has been arrested at Mumbai airport:

The Celebrity Big Brother winner was in tears when she was held at Mumbai Airport on her way to the opening of the Miss Bollywood musical in Germany.

Gere, 58, caused an outcry by grabbing Shetty, 32, and swept her backwards and kissed her at an Aids-awareness in New Delhi earlier this year.

The Pretty Woman star’s effigy was burned in the streets of India’s holiest city, Varanasi, after footage of him planting multiple kisses on Shetty’s cheek was broadcast on Indian television.

The furore appeared to die down initially until a member of the public in the Rajasthani city of Jaipur filed a suit “in the public interest” alleging that Gere and Shetty had violated India’s strict obscenity laws.

The controversial embrace and kiss took place earlier this year, and The Guardian noted:

Give or take a song, the scenario itself has played out like a Bollywood storyline - two lone innocents representing common sense and human values battling against an unjust and repressive society. The furious activists, including those burning effigies of both actors, mainly hail from Hindu fundamentalist groups: Shiv Sena, and the rather sinister youth wing of the rightwing BJP. Both have appointed themselves the guardians of Indian womanhood against corrupt western influences.

Bollywood has long drawn objections from such folk; from the beehive hairdos of the 50s and 60s to the famously sexy cabaret numbers of the 70s, the “western” accusation has been flung about willy-nilly. From this comes the notion, once prevalent about actresses in the film industries of the west (and the theatre before that), and still commonplace in mainstream India, that the women of Bollywood are “modern” anyway; as distinguished from the good Indian girls of the real world.

Shetty and Gere captured on video.

In the past few days, the ad campaign from the Italian label, Nolita, using nude photographs of an anorexic woman continues to be controversial:

The Nolita advertisement, timed to coincide with Milan fashion week, appeared Monday in Italian newspapers, including a two-page center spread in La Repubblica, and on billboards in Italy. A slogan above the naked photograph reads “No Anorexia.”

Flash&Partners, the fashion group that owns the Nolita brand, said in a statement that Toscani’s aim was “to use that naked body to show everyone the reality of this illness, caused in most cases by the stereotypes imposed by the world of fashion.”

The woman in the photo is Isabelle Caro from France, who is 27 years old and has been anorexic for 15 years. She weighs a mere 31 kg (68 lb) and suffers from the skin disease psoriasis. “I hid myself and covered myself up for too long,” she told the magazine Vanity Fair in an interview to be published Wednesday. “Now I want to show myself without fear, even though I know my body is repugnant.”

Olivero Toscani, the photographer, defends the images:

Toscani, known for his hard-hitting ad campaigns for the Italian clothing company Benetton, dismissed suggestions that anorexic girls would look to the French actress shown in the photos, Isabelle Caro, as a role model.

“Looking at my ad, girls with anorexia would say to themselves that they have to stop dieting. My ad poses no danger to them,” he told AFP.

“When you do something extreme, there are always people who oppose it,” Toscani said. “It shouldn’t be the photos that shock, but the reality.”

The Italian photographer said he became aware of anorexia while working in the fashion world.

“It’s this milieu that influences women to go on diets, to become thin. I studied the disease while making a short film about a 16-year-old girl suffering from anorexia that was shown at the Locarno (Italy) film festival in 2006,” he said.

As The Wall Street Journal points out, this ad campaign has brought to the forefront a longstanding problem in the modeling industry:

However, the campaign has already alienated some of the very people who champion the cause Nolita is trying to embrace. And it has also stirred up controversy over whether the brand is raising awareness about anorexia, or possibly profiting from it.

“This girl needs to be in a hospital, not at the forefront of an advertising campaign,” said Fabiola De Clercq, founder and president of ABA, the Italian association against anorexia, bulimia and obesity.

Ms. De Clercq, who says she suffered from anorexia for more than 20 years, called the ads “useless and dangerous.” She said the campaign “glorifies a woman who is sick and could lead others to be sickly thin because of all the attention.”

Mario Boselli, the president of Italy’s fashion-trade group, the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, who spearheaded a drive over the past year to nudge designers and fashion magazines to use fuller-bodied models, said he was dismayed by the campaign. “It bothers me because it’s being used for commercial purposes,” he said. “It’s quite disturbing, especially because this is such a serious disease.”

The model, Isabelle Caro, has also spoken out:

Speaking to the Italian issue of Vanity Fair about her skeletal frame, she talks about how her mother was very controlling of her as a child and didn’t allow the young Isabelle to go out and play with other children in case she got ill. Isabelle didn’t have any contact with other people besides her family and her violin teacher who she saw once a week.

“I had a very close relationship with my mother,” she says “which led me down the path of anorexia. She wanted me to be her little girl forever. So as I started puberty I hated the idea that my body was going to change for ever, to make my mother happy.

Her remarks underscore the need to avoid hasty conclusions about anorexia. In November 2006, Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston died of complications from anorexia. At that time, experts quoted in an International Herald Tribune article cautioned against oversimplifying the causality of anorexia, i.e. attributing it to girls and women desiring to look like models:

“This grossly oversimplifies the issue,” said Eric van Furth, president of the Academy for Eating Disorders, an international organization based in Northbrook, Illinois, and clinical director of the National Center for Eating Disorders in Leidschendam, Netherlands.

Emphasizing the catwalk, van Furth said, “helps to trivialize and stigmatize the illnesses, and can prevent people from getting help.”

Van Furth and other specialists say that many factors can contribute to anorexia, which is characterized by self- starving and excessive weight loss, and bulimia, a dangerous cycle of binge eating and purging.

According to Dr. Susan Ice, medical director of The Renfrew Center, an eating-disorder treatment facility in Philadelphia, these factors can include genes; early environmental influences; temperamental factors like low self-esteem; perfectionism; obsessiveness and anxiety; family variables; and often a “precipitating event,” like abuse or the loss of a loved one.

Ana Carolina Reston, (1985-2006)

The article continues, quoting from other experts who theorize a genetic predisposition to the disease:

Many researchers in the field use the metaphor of a gun to explain what leads to the onset of an eating disorder. According to this description, first coined by Dr. Cynthia Bulik of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, genes load the gun and the environment pulls the trigger.

Aimee Liu, author of “Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders,” to be published by Warner Books in February, has expanded the metaphor. Genes create the gun, she said in a telephone interview. The fashion industry, images of celebrities, relationships with parents and other environmental factors load the gun. Emotional distress pulls the trigger.

“It has nothing in real terms to do with looks,” she said. “Looks are a tool, a mechanism, that gets used by the eating disorder.”

Some experts caution that while banning emaciated models may send a positive message to young women at risk, it can also lead people to think that eating disorders are “behaviors of choice.”

“One doesn’t become anorexic because one wants to,” said Gerard Apfeldorfer, a Paris psychiatrist who specializes in eating disorders and is the author of several books on the subject.

Beyond the headlines, presuppositions and pat answers, there is much to explore.

It’s the kind of story that creates blazing headlines, with jolting phrases like “child pornography,” child porn,” and “child art porn.”

A photograph by a controversial American artist which is part of Sir Elton John’s private collection has been seized by police from a gallery on suspicion it may have breached child pornography laws.

The image, which featured two young girls one of whom was sitting down with her legs wide apart, was taken by the renowned photographer Nan Goldin.

Nan Goldin’s ‘Mel in bed with Valerie and Bruno laughing’
Goldin’s art, such as this 2001 photo, often features young girls…

The shot, from the artist’s Thanksgiving series, was to be exhibited at the Baltic Modern Art gallery, Tyneside, this week along with some of her other work. But the day before it was due to be viewed by the public, police came and removed the image over fears that it might be breaking the law.

It is thought that one of the assistant directors at the centre called in the authorities last Thursday after a private view as he was concerned that the picture could be offensive.

A news release on Elton John’s website confirms his ownership of the photograph and details some of its history:

The photograph entitled “Klara and Edda belly-dancing” (1998) is one of 149 images comprising the “Thanksgiving” installation by renowned US photographer Nan Goldin.

The photograph exists as part of the installation as a whole and has been widely published and exhibited throughout the world. It can be found in the monograph of Ms Goldin’s works entitled “The Devil’s Playground” (Phaidon, 2003), has been offered for sale at Sotheby’s New York in 2002 and 2004, and has previously been exhibited in Houston, London, Madrid, New York, Portugal, Warsaw and Zurich without any objections of which we are aware.

Elton John is known as one of the world’s foremost collectors of photographic art and has several thousand photographs in his collection, including works by Man Ray, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Diane Arbus and Ansel Adams.

It’s not the first time Nan Goldin’s art has been controversial.

Photographer and blogger Peter Marshall has an enlightening essay on Nan Goldin as well as a follow-up story in the aftermath of the seizure:

It is hard to see any sensible purpose that can be served by this action. Goldin is a highly admired photographer whose work has been shown in galleries around the world. She herself had a tough childhood, suffering abuse and running away from home at 11 after the suicide of her sister. Her work has always reflected her lifestyle - a mirror on her life.

Some years ago I wrote: “I find it difficult to imagine the position she was in, with these immense emotional pressures coming at an age when I was still in short trousers and being taught that sex was a Latin numeric prefix. Life was not without its traumas, but mine were less dramatic. Goldin was confronted in those sudden and tragic events with forces that most of us become aware of slowly over a period and evolve mechanisms to deal with or repress, and it is hardly surprising that the issues behind them have dominated her work. I don’t share her lifestyle or some of her attitudes, but I admire the honesty and clarity of her approach.”

Nan Goldin. “Self-portrait with Brian, NYC, 1983.” From The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986).

Nan Goldin’s work has always been fearless and brave, tackling subject matter others would shun. In her own words, from an interview:

It is very political. First, it is about gender politics. It is about what it is to be male, what it is to be female, what are gender roles… Especially The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is very much about gender politics, before there was such a word, before they taught it at the university. A friend of mine said I was born with a feminist heart. I decided at the age of five that there was nothing my brothers can do and I cannot do. I grew up that way. It was not like an act of decision that I was going to make a piece about gender politics. I made this slideshow about my life, about my past life. Later, I realized how political it was. It is structured this way so it talks about different couples, happy couples. For me, the major meaning of the slideshow is how you can become sexually addicted to somebody and that has absolutely nothing in common with love. It is about violence, about being in a category of men and women. It is constructed so that you see all different roles of women, then of children, the way children are brought up, and these roles, and then men, then it shows a lot of violence. That kind of violence the men play with. It goes to clubs, bars, it goes to prostitution as one of the options for women - prostitution or marriage. Then it goes back to the social scene, to married and re-married couples, couples having sex, it ends with twin graves.

Here is a brief documentary on Nan Goldin:

You can view a portion of the slide show, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, here. Be aware, some images are very stark; sexually and/or emotionally graphic.