•Notions of censorship and truth
•The indexical qualities of
photography in rendering truth
•Photographic manipulation and the
documentation of truth
•Censorship in advertising
•Censorship in art and photography
Ansel
Adams, Moonrise
Hernandes
New Mexico, c.
1941 - 2
Ansel
Adams, Moon
over Half Dome,
1960
Ansel
Adams, Aspens
Ansel
Adams, Aspens
‘Five years before coming to
power in the 1917 October
revolution, the Soviets
established the newspaper
Pravda.
For more than seven
Decades,until the fall of
Communism, Pravda, which
Ironically means “truth”, served
the Soviet Communist party by
censoring and filtering the news
presented to Russian and
Eastern Europeans’
Aronson,
E. and Pratkanis, A., 1992, Age
of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion, New York, Henry Holt & Co.,
pages 269 - 270
Stalin
with, and without, Trotsky
Kate Winslet on
cover of
GQ Magazine, with legs
elongated in photoshop
‘At that time [World War II], I
fervently
believed just about everything I
was exposed
to in school and in the media. For example, I
knew that all Germans were evil and
that all
Japanese were sneaky and
treacherous, while
all white Americans were clean-cut,
honest,
fair-minded, and trusting’
Elliot Aronson in Pratkanis and Aronson, (1992), Age
of
Propaganda, p. xii
‘With
lively step, breasting the wind, clenching their rifles, they ran down the
slope covered with thick stubble. Suddenly their soaring was interrupted, a
bullet whistled - a fratricidal bullet - and their blood was drunk by their
native soil’ – caption accompanying the photograph in Vue
magazine
‘Abstraction today is no longer
that of the map, the
double, the mirror or the
concept. Simulation is no
longer that of a territory, a
referential being or a
substance. It is the generation by models of a real
without origin or relativity: a hyperreal.
The territory
no longer precedes the map, nor
survives it.
Henceforth it is the map that
precedes the territory –
precession
of simulacra’
‘Whereas representation tries to
absorb simulation
by interpreting it as false
representation, simulation
envelops the whole edifice of
representation as
itself a simulacrum.
These would be the succesive phases of the image:
1.It
is the reflection of a basic reality.
2.It
masks and perverts a basic reality.
3.It
masks the absence of a basic reality.
4.It
bears no relation to any reality whatever : it is its own pure simulacrum.’
‘In the first case, the image is a good appearance:
the representation is of the order
of the sacrament.
In the second, it is an evil
appearance: of the order
of malefice.
In the third, it plays at being an
appearance: it is of the order of
sorcery. In the
fourth, it is no longer in the
order of appearance at
all, but of simulation’.
‘I don't recall seeing many
television images of the human consequences of this scene, or for that matter
many photographs published. A day later, I came across another scene on an
obscure road further north and to the east where, in the middle of the desert,
I found a convoy of lorries transporting Iraqi soldiers back to Baghdad, where
clearly massive fire power had been dropped and everyone in sight had been
carbonized. Most of the photographs I made of this scene have never been
published anywhere and this has always troubled me’.
Peter Turnley,
The
Unseen Gulf War, December 2002, at http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0212/pt_intro.html
‘As we approach the distinct
possibility of another war, a thought comes to mind. The photographs that I
made do not, in themselves, represent any personal political judgment or point
of view with respect to the politics and the right or wrong of the first Gulf
War. What they do represent is a part of a more accurate picture of what really
does happen in war. I feel it is important and that citizens have the right to
see these images. This is not to communicate my point of view, but so viewers
as citizens can be offered a better opportunity to consider the whole picture
and consequences of that war and any war. I feel that it is part of my role as
a photojournalist to offer the viewer the opportunity to draw from as much
information as possible, and develop his or her own judgment’.
Peter Turnley,
The
Unseen Gulf War, December 2002, at http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0212/pt_intro.html
‘A
carbonized Iraqi soldier, killed by Allied aircraft, as a convoy of Iraqi
soldiers tried to retreat to Baghdad from Kuwait City at the end of the Gulf
War. The scene of this photograph was on a highway that was to the northeast of
Kuwait City’. Peter Turnley,
1991
The "Mile of Death".
During the night of the 25th of February and the day of the 26th of February,
1991, Allied aircraft strafed and bombed a stretch of the Jahra
Highway. A large convoy of Iraqis were trying to make a haste retreat back to
Baghdad, as the Allied Forces retook Kuwait City. Many Iraqis were killed on
this highway. Estimates vary on the precise number of Iraqis killed during the
Gulf War. Very few images of Iraqi dead have been previously published
‘The claim that the Gulf War of
1990 would not take
place (1991), followed by the
assertion that it did not
take place, seems to defy all
logic. Such statements
are anticipated by the earlier
claim (1983) that the
only future war would be a hyperreal and dissuasive
war in which no events would take
place because
there was no more space for actual
warfare. The
underlying argument is that the
Gulf War was a
simulated war or a reproduction of
a war. Whatever
its human consequences, this was,
for Baudrillard, a
war which consisted largely of its
self-representation
in the real time of media coverage’
Macey, D. (2000), The
Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory,
London, Penguin, page 34
‘It is the de-intensified state of
war, that of the right
to war under the green light of the
UN and with an
abundance of precautions and
concessions. It is
the bellicose equivalent of safe
sex: make war like
love with a condom! On the Richter scale, the Gulf
War would not even reach two or
three. The build
up is unreal, as though the fiction
of an earthquake
were created by manipulating the
measuring
instruments’.
Cambridge, Polity Press, page 233
Censor
1.A
person authorised to examine films, letters, or publications, in order to ban
or cut anything considered obscene or objectionable
●
2.To
ban or cut portions of (a film, letter or publication)
●
Treffry, D. (ed.) (2001), Paperback
English Dictionary,
Glasgow: Harper
Collins
Morals
Principles of behaviour in
accordance with
standards of right and wrong
Treffry, D. (ed.) (2001), Paperback
English Dictionary,
Glasgow: Harper
Collins
Ethics
1.A
code of behaviour, especially of a particular group, profession or individual.
●
2.The
moral fitness of a decision, course of action etc.
●
3.The
study of the moral value of human conduct.
•
Treffry, D. (ed.) (2001), Paperback
English Dictionary,
Glasgow: Harper
Collins
‘Suppose that a picture of a
young woman inserting a
chocolate bar into her mouth
makes one person think of
fellatio, but someone else
says that this meaning says
more about the observer
than it does the picture. This
kind of dispute, with its
assumption that meaning
resides in a text quite
independently of individual
and group preconceptions, is
depressingly common in
discussions on advertising
…
‘Two intense images, two or perhaps
three which all
concern disfigured forms or
costumes which correspond
to the masquerade of this war: the
CNN journalists with
their gas masks in the Jerusalem
studios; the drugged
and beaten prisoners repenting on
the screen of Iraqi
TV; and perhaps that seabird
covered in oil and pointing
its blind eyes to the Gulf
sky. It is a masquerade of
information: branded faces
delivered over to the
prostitution of the image, the
image of an unintelligible
distress. No images of the field of
battle, but images of
masks, of blind or defeated faces,
images of falsification.
It is not war taking place over
there but the disfiguration
of the world’
Not acceptable
acceptable
“Decorative models do seem to
increase
recognition and recall of the
advertisement
itself. The same probably is true for nudity.
Thus , as one article on that
technique
suggested, ‘While an illustration
of a nude
female may gain the interest and
attention of
a viewer, an advertisement
depicting a
nonsexual scene appears to be more
effective in obtaining brand
recall”’.
Child Protection Act
•Deems the making, possession,
distribution and display of indecent pictures of children an offence
•Up to ten years in jail
Amy Adler
•Professor of Law at New York
University
•‘an irreconcilable conflict between
legal rules and artistic practice’
•The requirement that protected
artworks have ‘serious artistic value’ is the very thing contemporary art and
postmodernism itself attempt to defy
The Miller Test (1973)
•Asks three questions to determine
whether a given work should be labelled ‘obscene’, and hence denied
constitutional protection:
