FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPHER STUNNED AFTER HER CONTROVERSIAL PHOTOS OF NAKED CHILDREN ARE SEIZED FROM MUSEUM BY POLICE

A photographer whose work has hung at prominent art institutions around the world called it 'terrifying' to see police tear her pictures of nude children from the walls of a Texas museum as part of an investigation into child pornography. Sally Mann, 74, described the sudden seizure of her photos from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in January as 'awful' and 'shocking,' after local residents and politicians complained about her images of underage kids.
For months, Mann's work was displayed as part of the museum's Diaries of Home exhibition. 
One of the images displayed as part of the museum's Diaries of Home exhibition showed her son Emmett with a popsicle dripping on his bare body, his genitals visible in the image. Another showed her daughter Virginia in a bed she wetted. 
Now, Mann is not so sure she would include those images in another public exhibition.
'I'm risk-averse fundamentally. And more so now,' she told NPR. 'I don't want to be known as the controversial photographer.' 
This isn't the first time the photographs, which are a part of her Immediate Family collection, have drawn scrutiny.
In a 1992 New York Times Magazine story titled 'The Disturbing Photography of Sally Mann,' she said that a federal prosecutor warned her that some of the photos she selection for a traveling exhibition could lead to her to arrest. 
'We're entering a new era of culture wars, I'm quite sure,' she told NPR of the Texas seizure.
'And I think the people who are pursuing this are much more sophisticated and have many more tools at hand.' 
Police in Fort Worth held the photos as evidence of potential child abuse, eventually returning them to Mann in April.  
The photographer described recent attacks on art - including President Donald Trump saying he will wipe 'woke' art from museums like the Smithsonian - only makes artists live in fear. 
'They're not just reviewing the Smithsonian, they're actively rewriting history, and that's terrifying. This is Orwellian,' she told NPR. 
With the rise of social media and the ability to comment on anything at a moment's notice, Mann believes people will continue to attack art more often. 
And she believes these attacks often come from people who don't understand art. 
She argued that some of the most celebrated and widely known art - like Christian art depicting a nude Jesus Christ, or winged cherubs 'peeing into fountains right and left in every Italian garden' - are similar to her Immediate Family collection.  
'This is just stuck in their craw, this whole notion of what is completely innocent child nudity and they somehow sexualize it,' she told NPR. 'That seems to be the trigger for them, the nudity.' 
Mann has also taken other controversial photos, like those at the site of Emmett Till's murder, but she finds people only ever have problems with the photos of her nude children, which were taken decades ago on her nearly 800-acre Virginia property. 
Fort Worth Police spent thousands of dollars, including $7,000 on a trip to New York, as part of the child pornography investigation, according Fort Worth Report. 
The force sent five officers to New York to investigate Mann, whose work has been shown at several Big Apple museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.