Lecture 9 - Censorship and the Truth

Thursday 2^nd February

Lecture 9: 'Censorship and Truth'

This lecture looks at notions of censorship and truth, photographic manipulation and how much truth we're allowed to see.

Photography has indexical qualities; it represents a scene and something that actually happened. There's cliches like the camera never lies'.

In analogue photography there is an original image which physically exists {in the form of a negative). We like to think that images made like this have more truth to them than digital images.

Ansel Adams work is a good example to show that this is not necessarily the case. Arguably, the 'magic' in Adams' images comes from darkroom manipulation. From one negative he could suggest different times of day / different weather conditions. He deliberately published more than one version of some image from the same negatives to show the manipulation that was being done. The manipulation of photographs isn't something new which has come in with digital photography.

There are images of Stalin from which Yezhov and Trotsky have been edited out when they have fallen out of favour.

A few days after 9/11 a doctored image appeared of someone standing on top of towers posing for a tourist style snap as one of the planes flies towards them.

Kate Winslet's legs were famously lengthened for a GQ magazine cover. This was one of the first cases in which attention had been drawn to image alteration and it caused a scandal

There have also been examples of newspaper images being doctored to give a different appearance to a situation. Altering images like this seems more serious.

There has been much discussion of whether Robert Capa's 'Death of a Loyalist Soldier' is real. It has been decided recently that it was not staged. Is it important to know whether or not it is real? Or is it enough just to know that deaths are happening?

Is the truth that we read in a photograph coloured by the caption that goes with it? A caption can appeal to your emotions to make you think / feel a certain way about an image.

Baudrillard says that simulacra have four stages:

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 rts own pure simulacrum.'

He wrote quite a lot about the gulf war.

Peter Turnley photographed during the gulf war. He talks about the role of the digital journalist. Images can be shared so quickly that you can cause an immediate response. During the gulf war, images were mediated through newspapers and approved by the American army so that events and situations could be hidden. Turnley feels that you can now make a judgment which isn't imposed by the government.

Baudrillard wrote The Gulf War Did Not Take Place'. What he was getting at with this was that it wasn't like a real war, but something which was mediated through the press. It was a manipulated representation of a war.

Peter Turnley has tried to show that the guff was a reafwar in which people were dying. These types of images weren't shown to the public at the time that the war was on. In Our Time" - a book by Magnum includes equally graphic imagery of war.

children? She has been criticised for photographing her children without their clothes. Can you argue that it is different when it is a mother photographing her own children?

Tierney Gearon s images of her children were bought by Saatchi and exhibited in the 1 Am A Camera exhibition. Gearon has had no formal training but her images could be used to discuss the gaze from a female perspective. There were horrified comments from a paper at the time that the exhibition was on. It was investigated by the police who decided to leave the images up. Gearson insists that the images are completely innocent and not staged.

Nan Goldin's image of her friends children belly dancing was also investigated and taken down. Should the public have the right to go and see this image if they want to?

A famous image of child actress Brooke Shields in which she appears naked was taken by Gary Gross and sanctioned by her mother at the time. It was reproduced by Richard Prince and given the title Spiritual America' which refers to the folly of values in America. The image was later pulled from an exhibition at the Tate.

How much should be believe what we see in the media? Should we be protected from certain things? Where do you draw the line - where does art become obscenity?