When I was a teenager in the mid seventies and just getting interested in photography David Hamilton was everywhere, on every magazine rack and in every bookstore, even in Brisbane. Barely out of puberty myself I admit I was attracted to the impossibility of  his adolescent art-house eroticism. Later, at art schooI in Sydney in the late seventies , I learnt to disdain his cloying kitsch and forgot about him. It wasn’t till I was clearing out my childhood room a few years ago that I found some glossy pages again, wrinkled with decades of humidity, and gasped at the now-obvious pedophilia. Today I hear that after being accused of rape by his child models of long ago he has been found dead in his Paris apartment, a pill bottle by his side. The apotheosis of kitsch. But I sort of don’t want him to disappear altogether, his ‘sunlight filtered through corn onto downy skin’ look burrowed its way into our culture. And remains there.