In Fort Worth, Texas, a group show has turned into a battleground over art, censorship, and the ever-present specter of public morality. Sally Mann, the inimitable photographer whose lens captured the unsettling beauty of her own children in the 1980s and ’90s, finds herself at the center of yet another storm. A complaint by Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare led to police seizing Mann’s works—exhibited at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth as part of Diaries of Home—for “criminal investigation.”

Let’s be clear: Mann’s photographs have always walked the knife’s edge, turning the mundane into the mythic. Her images of children, including her own, confront the viewer with questions about identity, vulnerability, and the complexities of family life. But in Texas, where even a picnic table can apparently become a political stage, these nuanced portraits have been condemned as “grossly inappropriate” by critics like Bo French, who calls for decency to “prevail” as though it were a lost election.

The irony is almost poetic. Mann’s art, meant to evoke the layered, imperfect textures of home and childhood, has become a proxy for America’s puritanical underbelly. As Julie Trébault of the Artists at Risk Coalition aptly notes, this incident reflects a broader, chilling trend. Legislators and loud voices are weaponizing morality to silence artists, particularly women and LGBTQ+ creators, whose works ask society to reckon with its contradictions.

All too often, nudity, even that of children, is mistaken for sexuality, and images are mistaken for actions.

– Mann once wrote.

Indeed, the images are not the crime; the misreading of them is. In a culture hellbent on enforcing a brittle innocence, Mann’s art offers a profound reminder: humanity is messy, layered, and often disquieting. If we cannot face that, what hope do we have for understanding ourselves?

In Fort Worth, the battle over Mann’s photos is more than a local skirmish; it’s a referendum on art’s ability to confront, challenge, and provoke. Let’s hope the scalpel of censorship doesn’t dull the blade of artistic truth.