NCAC Censorship News Issue #68:
Fueled by the crusade led by Randall Terry and Focus On The Family against the photographer Jock Sturges, Tennessee prosecutors have charged Barnes & Noble with violating state obscenity law by displaying The Last Day of Summer and Radiant Identities by Sturges and The Age of Innocence by David Hamilton in its Brentwood store. In Tennessee, displaying or making accessible to minors material deemed obscene by local standards is a misdemeanor punishable by up to 30 days in jail or a $50 fine.
Terry—now of Loyal Opposition—and his followers have particularly targeted Barnes & Noble and Borders Bookstores, resorting to such tactics as defacing'books containing photographs of nude children. Photographs by Sturges, Hamilton and Sally Mann are all on Terry's blacklist as "criminal garbage."
Jock Sturges is a fine arts photographer whose work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris. David Hamilton and Sally Mann are renowned and critically-acclaimed artists as well. When Sturges' new collection of photos first came under attack, NCAC joined with other groups in rejecting the notion that his works are pornographic and in condemning attacks on bookstores for selling constitutionally-protected materials (Censorship News 67).