The State - News from Feb. 19, 1989

Yosemite National Park officials have decided that photographs hung in a park gallery by artist Ken Marcus, a disciple of photographer Ansel Adams, had a little too much nature in them. Eight of 10 photographs of nudes that Marcus, a Playboy photographer, entered in a show at the park were removed from the exhibit and replaced with his photographs of decaying park buildings. “Remember, our visitors are mostly families,” museum curator Dave Forgang said. “We’re a museum, yes, but we’re right down the path from the Yosemite Visitors Center.” Marcus, 42, spent a month in the park’s artists-in-residence program and during his visit posed Hollywood models standing in the buff alongside trees and in chilly mountain streams. Marcus said his photographs showed the human form as part of nature. He called the censorship “ridiculous.”