Censorship & Truth

CENSORSHIP & TRUTH

Over view

• 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 , Aspens

Theres examples where he uses the same negatives over and over again.

Before digital photography. Manipulates the image in the dark room.

Pravda. Russian news paper
One sided truth

Digital photography
Homegame.org/news/
similar to adjusters

GQ magazine,
manipulating images in photoshop

Robert Capa, Death of a loyalist Solider 1936

Mexican Suitcase

‘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

‘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




‘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.’

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 1981, in Poster, M. (ed.) (1988), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Cambridge, Polity Press, page 173

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

 Ken Jarecke, Iraqi Soldier,1991 - This image was used on newspapers to portrait truth but it was a little to much truth for people who read the paper eating there breakfast.

‘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’ 

Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 1995, in Poster, M. (ed.) (1988), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Cambridge, Polity Press, page 241

An - My Le . Small wars - 

Censorship

The practice or policy of censoring films, letters, or publications.

Treffry, D. (ed.) (2001), Paperback English Dictionary, Glasgow: Harper Collins

Censorship 

A person authorised to examine films, letters, or publications, in order to ban or cut anything considered obscene or objectionable .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

‘Everybody everywhere wants to modify, transform, embellish, enrich, and reconstruct the world around him – to introduce into an otherwise harsh or bland existence some sort of purposeful and distorting alleviation’ 

Theodore Levitt, The Morality (?) of Advertising, 1970

‘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' 

Benetton (UK) Ltd: The ASA deemed this 1991 poster to be a poor reflection on the advertising industry and ordered the advertisers not to repeat the approach.

“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”’. 

Phillips, M. J. (1997), Ethics and Manipulation in Advertising: Answering a Flawed Indictment, London, Quorum Books, page 121

Opium - As though she is in some kind of ecstasy. 

Christopher Graham, ASA director general, said: "This was the most complained about advertisement in the last five years. As a poster it clearly caused serious and widespread offence." He said it was sexually suggestive and likely to cause "serious or widespread offence" thereby breaking the British codes of advertising and sales promotion.

Amy Alder - 

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

Sally Mann, Candy Cigarette, 1989

Tierney Gearon . Untitled 2001

Nan Goldin Klara and Edda Belly - dancing 1998

Richard prince , Spiritual America 1983 ( After Garry Gross)