Transgression

What do you do with your heart when an artist you love does something terrible?

After her husband dies in 2011, a great photographer’s widow goes through his studio in preparation for a major bequest/retrospective of his work. While doing so, she comes across a portfolio she has never seen – containing what she and the museum know reveals an emotional intensity absent from all his other work. These photos, taken in 1970, also happen to be nudes of an underaged woman that are very sexual. When the subject, now grown, becomes aware of them, she demands that they be destroyed. Forced to wrestle with the question of what you do with art that is both important and itself a violation, the widow must reconsider her life and marriage.

Written by Terry Curtis Fox and directed by Avra Fox Lerner