Roskomnadzor blocked the site of the Bonhams auction house because of a photograph of Jock Sturges

Roskomnadzor blocked the website page of the world's largest and oldest British auction house Bonhams because of a photograph by American photographer Jock Sturges put up at auction. The page was entered into the register at the address via the secure https protocol, which threatens to terminate access to the entire site, notes the Roskomsvoboda project.

Roskomsvoboda clarifies that Roskomnadzor has already repeatedly blocked pages of websites where Sturges’ works were published. Now, for the first time in Russia, the website of the oldest auction house has been blocked because of an exhibited lot.

At the beginning of September 2016, an exhibition of Sturges’s works opened at the Moscow Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography. The photographer himself said that his photographs were dedicated to the study of female nature during puberty, so among the models there were naked girls. Other photographs showed visitors to nudist beaches.

Sturges’s work outraged Senator Elena Mizulina, who demanded that the exhibition be closed, calling it “a public display of materials with child pornography,” prohibited by Article 242.1 of the Criminal Code. According to Mizulina, the works of the American photographer “promote pedophilia” and “cannot be interpreted as a work of art.” Children's Rights Commissioner Anna Kuznetsova had the same opinion: according to her, Sturges's works were “recognized by Roskomnadzor as child pornography.”

On the morning of September 25, dozens of young people from the “Officers of Russia” organization blocked the entrance to the Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography. The head of the organization and member of the Public Chamber, Anton Tsvetkov, said then that the exhibition was closed: only a few journalists were allowed inside. An Interfax agency source in law enforcement agencies then reported that an unknown man entered the premises under the guise of a journalist and doused photographs of Sturges with an unidentified liquid that smelled of urine and acetone.