BEFORE YOU TRY TO SEND THAT ART BOOK THROUGH AN EXPRESS SHIPPING SERVICE, TAKE HEED: SOME OF THEM HAVE BECOME ARBITERS OF OBSCENITY. On May 20, Craig Morey did what he had been doing for years. He chose a few fine art prints to send to his publisher in England, took them to a local DHL Worldwide Express office, filled out the paperwork and sent them on their way. Morey, a well-known photographer whose work has been published and exhibited in the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Great Britain, Switzerland and Scandinavia, had never encountered any difficulty in shipping photographic prints before. This time, however, he was posting photos from Cincinnati, rather than from his home in San Francisco. Southern Ohio is a different world from San Francisco, but Morey didn't think the difference would affect something as basic as his ability to ship copies of his work. Two days after Morey gave his prints to DHL, his package was mysteriously returned to him with no explanation aside from the obvious fact that it had been opened and examined. Perplexed, he called DHL and spoke to a woman in customer service who identified herself as Jeannie. Jeannie informed him that the photos had been determined by DHL to be pornographic. "DHL does not handle pornography," she added curtly. Morey's elegant, erotic nudes hardly qualify as pornography. He favors conventionally attractive models, emotionally aloof, posed on draped platforms, artistically lit, meticulously printed in black and white. Although Morey sometimes includes light bondage imagery -- models with their wrists or ankles bound with heavy cord or leather -- the mood of his photos is consistently serene, rather than passionate or violent.

 

N E X T P A G E - - - - - - - - - - + _ "We do it as a customer service"     PHOTOGRAPHS BY CRAIG MOREY