UK News: David Hamilton found dead amid allegations of historical rape.

British photographer David Hamilton denied

the allegations against him.

On the Mediterranean beaches of Cap
d’Agde, British photographer David
Hamilton was a familiar figure in the
1980s looking for young girls to model
for his pictures.
“Shopping” was the word he used and
he knew what he was seeking: young,
early teens, preferably blonde, blue-
eyed and with pale, almost translucent
skin; the epitome of the “age of
innocence”, the title of one of his best-
selling books.
Parents rarely refused when he asked if
the youngsters could come to his studio
to pose, honoured that their child had
been spotted by a world famous artist.
But Hamilton’s motives, it has been
claimed, were far from innocent.
On Friday evening, days after
allegations resurfaced that he had raped
and sexually abused a number of his
young models, the London-born
photographer, who had repeatedly
denied the accusations, was found dead
in his Paris home. Police reported that a
bottle of medication was found nearby,
and declared that Hamilton, 83, had
taken his own life.
Radio and television journalist Flavie
Flament, 42, who had recently gone
public to claim Hamilton raped her 30
years ago when she was 13, declared she
was “devastated” by his death and
accused him of “cowardice”.
Flament’s claims, made in her recently
published book, were vigorously denied
by the photographer and her own
mother, but three other women came
forward anonymously to say Hamilton
had also raped and sexually assaulted
them as girls.
On Saturday, Flament’s literary editor,
Karina Hocine, said Hamilton’s death
had condemned his victims to eternal
silence.
“Of course she is devastated ... they say
it’s suicide, and of course as human
beings we are divided between the
horror of the situation and a feeling of
immense revulsion, because he has not
allowed justice to do its work,” Hocine
told LCI radio.
A few hours after Hamilton’s death was
announced, Flament issued a statement.
“I’ve just learned of the death of David
Hamilton, the man who raped me when
I was 13. The man who raped numerous
young girls, some of whom have come
forward with courage and emotion
these last few weeks. I’m thinking of
them, of the injustice that we were
trying to fight together. By his
cowardice, he has condemned us once
more to silence and unable to see him
condemned. The horror of this act will
never wipe out the horror of our
sleepless nights.”
Hamilton, who grew up in wartime
London – spending some time as a child
evacuee in Dorset – set out to be an
architect. Instead, aged 20, he travelled
to Paris to work as a graphic designer at
French Elle and later became the art
director of the grand magasin
Printemps.
At the same time he began taking
photographs, floaty, hazy images of pre
and early pubescent girls nude or in
transparent dresses in flowery, bucolic
scenes, that became a recognisable style
– the ‘Hamilton-blur’ – but were banned
in some countries as pornographic.
One of the girls who came forward after
Flament accused Hamilton told Le
Nouvel Observateur that he would send
his girls off to find a new “mouse” on
the beaches in the south of France .
“Mouse”, she revealed, was the word he
used for the girls’ genitals.
“I would approach the parents first, to
reassure them. I would say: ‘David
Hamilton would like to take a trial
photograph of your daughter. Then he
would approach them,” the unnamed
woman told the magazine.
Hamilton declared he was inspired by
Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial classic
Lolita, saying he shared the writers’s
“obsession with purity” and that his
work looked for “the candour of a lost
paradise”. In the 1970s, his “erotic-
romantic” images published in books
and kitschy calendars raised few
eyebrows, and his 1977 soft-focus erotic
film Bilitis became an aesthetic
manifesto for a generation of artists.
Like other well known and famous
males of his generation, however, by the
start of the 21st century, his pictures
had begun to divide option: what he
claimed was innocence and candour
appeared not just passé but perverse
and pornographic.
Chris Warmoli wrote in the Guardian in
2005: “Hamilton’s photographs have
long been at the forefront of the ‘is it
art or pornography?’ debate.”
He responded to the resurfacing of the
rape claims by threatening to sue for
defamation. “I have done nothing
improper. Clearly the instigator of this
media lynching is looking for her 15
minutes of fame, by defaming me in her
novel,” he said last week.
Hamilton pointed out he had never
been found guilty of any charge, and
that the time had passed in which any
could be brought. Under France’s statute
of limitations, charges must be brought
within 20 years for rape and 10 years
for sexual abuse.