Three years ago, police were called to the Saatchi gallery in north-west London when the question of indecency was raised in connection with photographs by the American Tierney Gearon of her young children in various states of undress. This week it has been photographs by Betsy Schneider of her daughter naked at east London's Spitz gallery that have made headlines. The Gearon case was resolved when Chris Smith, the then culture secretary, intervened on the gallery's behalf with a brisk lecture to the police about censorship. Much of the furore had been got up, with characteristically synthetic moral outrage, by the News of the World. What is disturbing now is that the Spitz gallery itself has closed the exhibition and blacked out windows - acting on complaints from the public. In 2001, the Saatchi gallery stayed open and refused to remove any of Gearon's pictures, despite a police threat to seize them. Today, it is the Spitz gallery that has called in the police. One of the ironies of Schneider's predicament is that she knows her work could not be exhibited in her conservative small-town home of Tempe, Arizona, without provoking trouble, but she had assumed a more liberal standard might apply in a cosmopolitan European capital. A further irony is that Schneider once worked as an assistant to Sally Mann, who not only pioneered this territory of intimate family portraiture, but also took far greater risks with offending public sensibilities.

Mann's work is tinged with an ambiguity about her daughters' precocious sense of themselves both as subjects and objects. Perhaps the very heart of her matter is to question our cherished idea of childhood innocence. In turn, some of Gearon's pictures captured a little of this unsettling sensation with their elements of the surreal - the children photographed semi-nude wearing masks. By comparison, Schneider's series of snaps of her daughter seems platitudinous, so bald in statement as to be almost bland. One might ask not whether her work is pornographic, but whether it gets past developmental anatomy to count as art. Since her work has made it on to the walls of a gallery, it is, ipso facto, art. But because some onlookers choose to regard it as pornographic, that does not mean that it becomes, ipso facto, pornography. If Schneider had posted these photographs on the web and was charging people via credit cards to download them, that would be pornography. The context governs the meaning.

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