Jan Saudek's Black Sheep & White Crow. Saudek's work is characterised by an interest in beauty and personal erotic freedom. Biennale director Jeff Moorfoot said he understood a woman went to the Office of the Child Safety Commissioner, Tourism Victoria and the local council to complain that the 1995 Saudek work, Black Sheep & White Crow, which she had seen in an ad promoting the exhibition in Art Almanac, depicted a mother prostituting her child.
Mr Moorfoot said the council and tourism agency warned him that a controversy surrounding the image could imperil funding, even though Saudek's works were in a separate room with a warning at the door that they contained adult content.
Mr Moorfoot said Saudek was an ''international superstar'' and the Czech Republic's most important photographer. His works were included for the lineage of their subject matter and techniques.
Now in his 70s, Saudek was in a concentration camp as a child and worked clandestinely as a photographer under communism. His work is characterised by an interest in beauty and personal erotic freedom with metaphors of resistance, escapism and individual expression, comparable to those of Czech-born novelist Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Mr Moorfoot said he made his displeasure clear to all three government agencies. ''I hate this stuff, but as director, I've got to think about the festival long term - if we have no funding, we have no festival.''
Arts identities yesterday were outraged at another revival of the child pornography/censorship scandal that has dogged photographers since the Bill Henson furore in 2008, when police raided a show of the Melbourne photographer's work at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney after complaints.
No charges were laid, but the issue of photographing nude children became a lightning rod for public anxiety about consent, privacy and paedophilia.
Alasdair Foster, formerly the head of the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney and now a cultural development consultant, gave the opening speech at the biennale on Saturday night.
Describing himself as a ''huge fan'' of Saudek's, he said the work, which depicts a mother and daughter (the artist does not use models) in a staged tableau, is an example of Saudek's interest in depicting ''love in its many forms'', in this case how a parent passes on what it is to be adult to her child.
Mr Foster said it was a subtle and nuanced work, and he rejected the idea that it depicted the prostitution of a minor - or even that the hand tinting deliberately heightened its likeness to the ''dirty postcards'' of 19th century photography.
''People supposedly standing up to protect children are creating a situation where we can only look at children in a sexualised way,'' he says.
Representatives of Tourism Victoria and the Ballarat City Council did not return calls.
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