We'll show a few of Graham's nudes, but apart from those it will be what the police took.' 'The art world is tackling this issue head on.' (A petition signed by Sir Hugh Casson, Laurie Lee, Peter Blake and Lucinda Lambton was important in persuading the police to return the photographs.) 'But it needs to be addressed by politicians and the public generally. 'I'm going to be showing the stupidity of it all,' says Nicky Akehurst, owner of the London gallery putting on the exhibition. The so-called paedophile ring was in fact a loose association of artists, including Peter Blake, Graham Arnold and David Inshaw and the photographer Ron Oliver, who had himself been the subject of a similar raid two months earlier. Losing little time, they announced that they had 'smashed' an extensive paedophile ring which involved hundreds of children and had been carefully built up over 20 years.Īs it turned out, what they had 'smashed' was the life of an artist - their suspect Graham Ovenden - who had built his international reputation on sensitive paintings and photographs of children, some of them nude. They came away with one suspect, 28 boxes of negatives, 67 videos and a large quantity of photographs. Early in the morning of Wednesday 10 March 1993, officers from the Obscene Publications Squad of the Metropolitan Police burst into a house in Liskeard, Cornwall, which they believed to be at the centre of a child pornography ring.
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