Standing in a marble bath with gold taps, steam up to her knees, all that the pre-pubescent Shields is wearing is a necklace, red nail polish and a lot of make-up. These womanly accessories on her child’s posed, naked body make very uncomfortable viewing and raise many questions, including where the boundary lies between art and child pornography.

It is this image that the Tate Modern in London had planned to include in its current Pop Life show, before the obscenity squad of the Metropolitan police paid them a visit, and the photograph of the actress and model was removed.

No such fuss in Belgium, mind you. Pascale Bertolini, press officer at the Botanique, where Controverses is showing, says there has been no reaction from the authorities or any complaints from the public. Still, a sign saying “Warning to the public: visitors, and particularly the young, may find some images offensive” is clearly on display at the entrance and on publicity material.

Like many of the photographs in the exhibition, this 1975 shot of Shields has been the subject of legal proceedings; in one case, the American celebrity tried to prevent its use. The court rejected Shields’ claim for $1 million in damages because her mother had signed a contract ceding all image rights to the photographer Garry Gross.

Each of the pictures has a controversial story to tell. “Sometimes it’s to do with a legal conflict, sometimes a public debate, but always the expression of conflicting opinions,” says Christian Pirker, a Swiss lawyer and one of the curators of the exhibition, which was originally shown in Switzerland.

Some of the photos look harmless enough, but the explanatory note details the controversy that the image unleashed. Take, for example, Napoléon Sarony’s 1882 portrait of Oscar Wilde, posing on an armchair, wearing breeches and a velvet jacket, hand against his cheek. Unauthorised copies of the photograph prompted Sarony, whose clients also included the actress Sarah Bernhardt, to go to court over the matter.

Sarony convinced the US court of the work’s artistic value and originality, through aspects such as the choice of clothing, composition and the use of lighting. The court ruled that the photograph was “an original work” and, for the first time, extended copyright protection to photographs.

The controversy surrounding the more recent images is better known. There is the shocking photograph of naked inmates piled on top of each other at Abu Ghraib, with two American soldiers giving a thumbs-up sign. Also featured is the picture of Sophie Dahl from 2000 used to advertise Yves-Saint-Laurent’s Opium perfume, the one where she is in a suggestive pose, lying on her back, naked except for jewellery and gold stilettos. The image prompted so many complaints to the UK Advertising Standards Authority that it was removed from national billboards. In France, the picture was posted in bus shelters for weeks without any similar outcry.

The French weren’t as laid back in 2005, however, about the image of Jean-Paul Sartre with a cigarette in his hand. The portrait, taken at a Paris theatre some 60 years earlier, was used by France’s National Library to advertise an exhibition on Sartre. To comply with a 1991 French law banning direct and indirect tobacco advertising, the library decided to airbrush out the offending cigarette.

The photograph chosen by the Botanique exhibition for its own posters is “Kissing Nun”, created in 1992 by Oliviero Toscani for a Benetton advertisement. Depicting a young nun dressed in white kissing a priest dressed in black, the image was banned in Italy following pressure from the Vatican and withdrawn in France in the wake of complaints from religious associations.

Another famous kiss in the collection is Robert Doisneau’s photograph of a young man and woman kissing on a busy Parisian street, an image found on many a student’s bedroom wall and one that raised the question of a photographer’s right to use photos of the public.

Power plays an important role in most of the work, be it the power of editors making selections, armies controlling wartime photos or authorities imposing bans. With such powerful subject matter, it’s an exhibition that successfully shocks, provokes and challenges.

Until 22 November

Le Botanique

Koningstraat 236, Brussels

www.botanique.be