OUAN501 - Censorship and Truth (8)

I found today's lecture incredibly insightful overall, I felt like I learnt a lot whilst also being exposed to a lot of work and history that I hadn't previously seen. The theme of the lecture was based around the idea of censorship and truth. Based on the title of the lecture, I had a faint idea about the content, but it was a very enjoyable presentation with lots of interesting information being delivered.

A premise that was common in all of the work and analogies delivered to us was the idea of false representation and the way an audience interprets things at face value rather than looking deeper. This was demonstrated in the way photographs are handled and shown to an audience in conjunction with the publishing of those photographs and the way they are delivered to the people who are viewing them. The first piece of photographic work we were shown was a depiction of the Gulf War. This was actually the first time I had seen any documentation of the Gulf war, I'm ashamed to say - especially when comparing it to the amount of documentation I've seen on other events as large scale as that. The tutor showed us some images from the war, specifically of some of its horrors. An example of this was images of soldiers that had been carbonised. This occurs when biological matter is exposed to sudden searing heat. (It was left to our imagination how this had happened but you assume it was from a bomb given the context of the photograph.) From this it can be carbonised very quickly, reducing the matter to just carbon, and destroying the original thing. The reason for showing us these images specifically is that they were deemed too graphic and too horrific to be shown publicly in the media. An image that a lot of emphasis was put on for depicting the idea of censorship and hiding the real truths behind the horrors of the ways was a photograph taken by Kenneth Jarecke, an American photojournalist. The photograph that was shown, depicted an Iraqi soldier incinerated inside a truck. The controversy and censorship problem arises when you learn that the American press organisations avoided publishing the photograph due to the fact that it contradicted their position on the war which was that they only attacked at night. Ultimately the issue is that since the photograph wasn't published, then in the mind of the American people it wasn't happening. Another photographers work we were shown, who happens to be someone whose work I've looked at before is Sally Mann. We looked at what she was doing in regards to censorship and how she contradicted the idea of it with her photography book 'Immediate Family', published in 1992. It was an incredibly fascinating collection of photographs and work as a whole, despite them only involving her three children. The content and themes running throughout the photographs seemed to be fairly straight forward and incredibly candid. They were playing games and just photographed going about their lives. Some of the criticism she received for the photographs were directed at the fact some of her younger children were photographed naked and then published. Due to this she had some very mixed responses. People wrote to her explaining how the photographs she had taken and published, induced past feelings around incest whilst others simply criticised her parenting. However there was some positive feedback on her work amongst everything else and Sally Mann was quoted saying, 'What an artist captures, what a mother knows and what the public sees can be dangerously different things'. In regards to the censorship issue again, this is yet another topic that people wanted covering up and hiding from public view - at least that was their opinion. But Sally Mann decided to publish her work for the world to see.

Throughout this lecture I've learnt a lot about various artists work and the way their work was handled in relation to censorship. Furthermore, it has been informative in respect to the way that we are more often than not 'guarded' from various forms of media and it's important not to take things at face value due to the way aspects such as press and media are censored to make sure it correlates with the public opinion, and what the public wants.