After two decades of movies, her best known films are still arguably The Blue Lagoon (1980), which included nude scenes between teenage lovers on a tropical island (Shields later testified before a U.S. Congressional inquiry that older body doubles were used in some of them), and Endless Love (1981).

Brooke Shields was only 12 years old when the film was released, and controversy regarding child pornography arose. This was followed by a slightly less controversial and less notable film, Wanda Nevada.

Brooke Shields' first major film role was as a lead actress in Louis Malle's Pretty Baby (1978), a movie in which she played a child named Violet who lived in a brothel (in which there were numerous nude scenes).

In 2009, a picture of a naked Brooke Shields taken when she was 10 and included in a work by Richard Prince, Spiritual America, created a row. It was removed from an exhibition at the Tate Modern after a warning from the police.

In 1983, Brooke Shields appeared on the cover of the September issue of Paris Vogue, the October and November issues of American Vogue and the December edition of Italian Vogue. During that period Shields became a regular at New York City's nightclub Studio 54.

By the age of 16, Brooke Shields had become one of the most recognizable faces in the United States, because of her dual career as a provocative fashion model and child actress.

The images portray Brooke Shields nude, standing and sitting in a bathtub, wearing makeup and covered in oil. The courts ruled in favor of the photographer due to a strange twist in New York law. It would have been otherwise had Brooke Shields been considered a child "performer" rather than a model.

Gross was the photographer of a controversial set of nude images taken in 1975 of a then ten-year-old Brooke Shields with the consent of her mother, Teri Shields, for the Playboy Press publication Sugar 'n' Spice.