Man whose baby portrait featured on 'Nevermind' cover sues Nirvana for 'child pornography'

Elder Spencer, whose baby portrait was used as the album's cover (Image: Twitter/@Derek_Brink)

Spencer Elden, the man whose baby portrait featured in 'Nevermind' album cover of American rock band Nirvana, has filed a lawsuit alleging "child pornography".

In the 30-year-old image, Elden, then an infant, is seen underwater in a swimming pool with his genitalia exposed. It shows him swimming towards a dollar note fixed on a fishhook.

The portrait has generally been considered as a swipe against capitalism, as it apparently intends to show the baby swimming towards the dollar note.

However, Elden's lawyer Robert Y Lewis said the inclusion of currency in the photograph, along with the nude infant, makes the child appear as a "sex worker", NBC News reported.

The lawsuit by Elden has been filed in the US District Court's central district of California and seeks at least $150,000 from each of the defendants.

The list of defendants include Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, the surviving band members; Kirk Weddle, the photographer; Courtney Love, the executor of Kurt Cobain's estate; Robert Fisher, the art director and a number of companies that were involved in release or distribution of the album over the past three decades, the report added.

A copy of the lawsuit, obtained by Variety, stated: "Defendants intentionally commercially marketed Spencer's child pornography and leveraged the shocking nature of his image to promote themselves and their music at his expense."

"Defendants used child pornography depicting Spencer as an essential element of a record promotion scheme commonly utilized in the music industry to get attention, wherein album covers posed children in a sexually provocative manner to gain notoriety, drive sales, and garner media attention, and critical reviews," it further added.

The lawsuit came as a surprise as Elden, on previous occasions, has recreated the album's cover image (with swim trunks on). He, however, had expressed mixed feelings about the portrait. "It’s cool but weird to be part of something so important that I don’t even remember," he said in 2016, according to The Guardian report.