It’s just a 30-year-old picture of a baby, right? Maybe not.

Spencer Elden, who as a baby was featured on the cover of Nevermind, the massively successful album by Seattle-based grunge sensations Nirvana, is suing the surviving band members and the estate of the late Kurt Cobain claiming that the use of his photograph on the cover constitutes child sex abuse imagery.

The album cover depicts the naked, four-month old Elden underwater in a swimming pool. The photo was digitally enhanced: designers added a dollar bill on a fishhook to the image and the baby appears to be enthusiastically swimming toward it. Non-sexualized nude photos of infants are generally not considered child pornography under law.

However, Robert Y. Lewis, Elden’s lawyer, offered another interpretation of the image, arguing that it crosses the line into child sex abuse imagery. According to his brief, the inclusion of currency in the shot makes the baby appear “like a sex worker.”

“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,” reads the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court’s central district of California. “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.”

Elden, 30, is asking at least $150,000 from each of the defendants, who include include surviving band members Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic; Courtney Love, the executor of Kurt Cobain’s estate; Guy Oseary and Heather Parry, managers of Cobain’s estate; photographer Kirk Weddle; art director Robert Fisher; and a number of existing or defunct record companies that released or distributed the album in the last three decades.

Elden is even suing original Nirvana drummer Chad Channing. Channing was replaced by Grohl in 1990, before the album was recorded or the cover photography shot.

Though Elden seemed not to mind his Nevermind notoriety – he has repeatedly recreated the pose as a teenager and adult (with swim trunks on) for various album anniversaries – in most of the interviews accompanying these photo shoots, he expressed deeply mixed feelings about whether he was exploited by this appearance. This suit is the first time he has described it as pornographic, though.

He also claims the band promised to cover his genitals with a sticker or other artwork, but the designers did not put anything like that on the album cover.

Elden has never wavered from his claim that he was never compensated for the photo, beyond the $200 his parents were paid for it on the day of the shoot. In previous interviews, he claims that he tried to get in touch with Grohl and Novoselic, on a friendly basis, but never got a reply. The lawsuit also claims that Elden’s parents never even signed paperwork allowing any use of the image.

“Neither Spencer nor his legal guardians ever signed a release authorizing the use of any images of Spencer or of his likeness, and certainly not of commercial child pornography depicting him,” reads the suit.

According to an NPR interview, Elden’s father was friends with the photographer, but didn’t know what the photo shoot was at the time the picture was taken. Three months later, they saw a 9′-by-9′ blow-up of the cover on the Tower Records wall on Sunset Boulevard. Two months later, Geffen Records sent 1-year-old Spencer Elden a platinum album and a teddy bear.