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

The camera never lies

• Ansel Adams - iconic, quality or common
• Moon over half dome, 1960
• Aspens - manipulation in dark room alters what the print shows
• Documentary photography
• rendering of real life events
• propaganda 
• notion that the photograph renders the truth
• individuals being removed from photographs
• Robert Capa - not real name or real image. Staging an image, was a soldier dying but not in the context it was said to be
• ‘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’
• Digital photography
• morals and ethics of advertising
• digital technology can change the context of the original image
• frivolous aspect
• digitally enhanced images, more appealing to the audience
• is it fair game to do this?
• is what is presented in a photograph true?
• does it matter?

Abstraction

• ‘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:
• It is the reflection of a basic reality.
• It masks and perverts a basic reality.
• It masks the absence of a basic reality. 
• It bears no relation to any reality whatever : it is its own pure simulacrum.’

Gruesome images in the media

• is that what you want to be seeing?
• documentary imagery gone to far?
• different levels of newspaper will show different things
• making art out of conflict

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)

Morals

• Principles of behaviour in accordance with standards of right and wrong

Ethics

• A code of behaviour, especially of a particular group, profession or individual
• The moral fitness of a decision, course of action etc
• The study of the moral value of human conduct

Advertising

• sexual aspects of advertising
• placing suggesting in peoples heads
• does it say more about the individual than the advert?
• banned within advertising but celebrated within fin art
• 'The requirement that protected artworks have a 'serious artistic value' is the very thing contemporary art and post modernism itself attempt to defy'

Obscenity Law

• to protect art whilst prohibiting trash
• the dividing line between speech and non-speech
• the dividing line between prison and freedom

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?