LECTURE ELEVEN// Censorship and ‘Truth’

•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: