Jounalist William T. Vollmann has a reputation for edgy writing: He’s smoked crack with hookers in San Francisco, marched with the mujahideen in Afghanistan during their war with Russia in the ’80′s and covered the Bosnian War in the ’90′s. Vollmann is no shrinking violet, but is he a domestic terrorist?

In a recent NPR story, Vollman reveals that a Freedom of Information Act informed him that the FBI had been watching him for years — he was even listed as a suspect in the Unabomber case. It’s an odd story that all began when Vollmann became associated with the controversial photographer Jock Sturges, and it’s a cautionary tale about how America’s confusion about art versus pornography can have far-reaching implications in the hands of an inept bureaucracy.

Sturges and Vollmann had been in contact in 1990 when the photographer had inquired whether Vollmann might be available to write an introduction to his latest coffee table book. Sturges’ photographs feature nude children and adolescents in non-sexual settings. Controversy about Sturges’ work led to an FBI raid and info on Sturges’ computer led the agency to Vollmann.

The NPR story tells the rest of the decades-long cat-and-befuddled-mouse game that followed, and it speaks volumes about the energized sexual paranoia that Americans often feel around the subject of children and sexuality.

Clearly the sexual abuse of children and child pornography are abhorrent. That said, Sturges work has consistently been defended in court: The 1990 raid failed to get an indictment from a San Francisco grand jury and, in 1998, when both Tennessee and Alabama tried to get Sturges’ books classified as pornography, both cases were unsuccessful. The fact that the photographer’s images regularly feature groups of siblings and their parents in family portraits seemed to make no difference to the FBI who classified the mere association with the photographer to be a damning mark against Vollmann.

As a journalist who regularly writes about visual art, this is always a frustrating issue. The nude is art’s fundamental subject, yet American puritanism often insists on infringing on creative expression. We all have birthday suit portraits adorning the pages of our parent’s photo albums and in the age of the internet, Facebook and Instagram are awash with images of bare-bottomed kids just being kids. A nude photograph of a child or an adolescent isn’t sexual in and of itself, and cases like this only prove that pornography is often found in the eyes of the beholder regardless of the images they behold.

Listen to the full NPR interview here.

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