Lecture 9 - Censorship and 'Truth'

Objectives

• 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

How things are censored from us, what we are prevented from seeing
Notions of truth - we as public ought to have the right to know about
We don't have a choice as to what we see

Analogue & Digital

• Analogue photography becomes the original, unedited
• Reproductions = copies
• Manipulation in terms of digital photography - seen as a given, to 'improve' an image
• Digital photography is a code that 'exists'
• We believe there is much truth in an analogue photograph than a digital one

Ansel Adams


Moonrise Hernandes New Mexico, c. 1941-2

Photography captures a scene - 'the camera never lies' though it can

Surrounding mythology

Moon over Half Dome, 1960
Black and white photography
Is it the way he composed this that gives it the quality or is it as much in the printing?

Aspens
Made countless reproductions using the same negative
Uses different lighting, shades, exposure times and was able to suggest completely different times of day
Deliberate and conscious decision to print more than one image
Truth in photograph is not new that comes with digital photography
It is something people have been practising for many years through film

Stalin

Stalin with, and without, Nikolai Yezhov (around 1925)
Stalin with, and without, Trotsky

• Doctoring of imagery
• What is published to us is not necessarily the truth
• Sinister - political agenda
• Is the government only allowing us to see a certain 'truth'

Airbrushing

Kate Winslet on cover of GQ magazine, with legs elongated in photoshop

• We take airbrushing for granted, as the norm
• This example caused a scandal at the time
• Notions of truth - is it really affecting anyones world?
• Photography in newspapers - documenting the truth
• We read and believe it, though is it less frivolous than airbrushing in magazines?

Robert Capa, Death of a Loyalist Soldier, 1936

• Capa was photographing during the Spanish Civil War
• It has long been questioned whether this photograph was authentic
• Does it matter? Is it indicative of what is happening in war?

"At that time (WW2), 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

Does accompanying text alter the way we interpret a photograph? And does this alter the 'truth'?
Does it project a certain way of thinking that is different to the 'truth'?

'A deliberate and successful attempt by one person to get another person by appeals for reason to freely accept beliefs, attitudes, values, intentions, or actions'
Tom L. Beauchamp, Manipulate Advertising, 1984

Baudrillard & The Gulf War 

'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'...'whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum'

'It is a masquerade of information: branded faces delivered over to the prostitution of the image'

• Baudrillard believes the war was largely undocumented
• 'The Gulf War did not take place'
• Manipulated representation not the war

Peter Turnley

• Peter Turnley was a photojournalist working in the Gulf War in 1991
• Digital processes at this time was relatively new
• An image can be exposed to millions of people via the internet instantaneously 

'Most of the photographs I made of this scene have never been published anywhere and this has always troubled me'...'I feel that is a part of my role as aphothournalist to offer the viewer the opportunity to draw from as much information as possible'.

• Disturbing, graphic photographs
• Do we need to be shown these in order to understand the real 'truth'
• Does colour make a photograph more 'real'

An-My Le

Fine Art photographer who documented world events
Is there a place for tho or is Turnely's work more 'valid'?
Does it demonstrate the harshness of war?


Censorship

Censorship - 'The practice or policy of censoring films, letters, or publications'
Censor - 'A person authorised to examine films, letters, or publications, in order to ban anything obscene of objectionable'

'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

A meaning says more about the observer than it does the picture
Is it indicative of the viewer?


Benetton

• Oliviero Toscani who has built a career on his use of photography that does intend to shock
• United Colors of Benetton - somewhat shocking and controversial imagery
• Challenges society perceptions of race, sex, sexuality etc
• Clothing is secondary to the imagery itself
• 'No such thing as bad publicity'

The ASA deemed this 1991 poster to be a poor reflection on the advertising industry and ordered the advertisers not to repeat the approach. If people are complaining about these images, is censorship required?


Amy Adler - The Follow of defining 'serious' art

• Professor of Law at NY University
• 'an irreconcilable conflict between legal rules and artistic practice'
• The requirement that protected artworks have 'serious artistic value' is the very thing contemporary and postmodernism itself attempt to defy

The Miller Test, 1973

Asks three questions to dermic whether a given work should be labelled 'obscene'

1. Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest
2. Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable state law
3. Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

Sally Mann, Candy Cigarette, 1989

• Much of her work revolved around her family, particularly her young children
• Is it going against the moral standards a mother should have?
• Does the fact that she is her child alter the way we interpret the photograph?

Tierney Gearon

'I think that the pictures are incredible innocent and totally unsexual. I don't crop them, I don't retch them and the shots are never staged.'

Final thoughts

• Just how much should we believe the 'truth' represented in the media?
• And should we be protected from it?
• Is the manipulation of the truth fair game in a  Capitalist, consumer society?
• Should art sit outside of censorship laws exercised in other disciplines?
• Who should be protected, artist, viewer, or subject?