Please.
This
is
a
child
we're discussing here.
She deserves to be protected at all costs. Michael should have given more thought to the connotations of using 'Lolita' as a title, for her protection, if for nothing else. Regardless of everything else, he should have erred on the side of caution and not slandered her person or invited such conversations as the one we're having here for the sake of an 'artistic' image.
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At all costs? Protected from what?
Are you seriously suggesting that on the strength of that image that someone is going to travel thousands of miles and track that girl down and do something nasty to her? And that this image would prove more likely to encourage such behaviour than a similar picture published in National Geographic under documentary auspices?
Nor is it slander, slander applies only to the spoken word. What you must mean is libel. To prove libel you must prove damage, and usually that must be financially quantifiable. So you can't mean that. What you must mean is that it's a mean thing to say, and somehow imagine that saying mean things (even when no such denotation or connotation was intended) should be illegal.
In most countries no model release is required for the making of fine art images.
When I saw that image and title I immediately thought that the girl was flirting. Someone of such tender years flirting with an older man immediately brings to mind "Lolita" as a loose cultural reference. From the title I got the impression that MR may have been slightly uncomfortable, or perhaps not. For after all such flirting is perfectly benign if the person who is being flirted with is a good and decent person who has no intention of pursuing the matter further. MR is clearly such a person.
Even if there are a bunch of dirty paedophiles furiously masturbating to the image (which possibility seems remote in the extreme) so what? They could equally well be aroused by a catalogue of children's clothing. Sick people can be aroused by things that normal people find innocuous, that is no reason to ban everything that any sick person could possibly take pleasure in.
At all costs? At the cost of our liberty? Our self-respect? The richness of art and literature?
The only comfort I take is that the young lady herself would probably hold you in the same contempt that I do.
Now run along and put "I believe that children are our future" on the stereo and sway misty-eyed as you contemplate a world stripped of all truth and beauty.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
– C. S. Lewis