Monday 12 March 2012

Lecture 9 - Censorship and 'Truth'

Here are my notes from the ninth lecture Censorship and 'Truth' on 02/02/2012.

Overview

  • notions of censorship an truth
  • the indexical qualities of photography in rendering truth
  • photographic manipulation and the documentation of truth
  • censorship in advertising 
  • censorship in art and photography

Indexical qualities of photography - captures a scene that is going on. 
Camera never lies - actually it can.
With analogue photography, there are the negatives which are the original. In digital photography is code that sits there and exists - image doesn't actually exist, it's just a code.

More truth in analogue photography than digital.

Manipulation is not true.

'Fove years before coming to power in the 1917 October revolution, the Soviets established the newspaper Pravada...'

What is actually published to us isn't actually the truth. Political agenda is only publishing you to see what they want you to believe is the truth.

The internet masks exposure to the internet in order to expose things that aren't necessarily real to the masses through the internet.

GQ magazine cover

Kate Winslet on cover of GQ magazine, with elongated photoshop - does it really make any difference to us?

Photo journalists 

Is it a real image? Does it really matter if it is?

'At the time (world War II), I fervently believe just about everthing I was exposed to in school and in the media. For example...'

Does a photograph stand up in it's own right?

Persuasion - 'a deliberate and successful attempt by one person to get another person by appeals o reason to freely accept beliefs, attitude...'

'Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation id no longer that of a territory...'

Does colour add more of a sense of real life in photos as opposed to black and white imagery.


Censorship

'Everybody everywhere wants to modify, transform, embellish, enrich and reconstruct the world around him - to introduce...'

To sell you a life that you wish to have.

'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...' 

Where do we stand with it? Is it left to the viewers thought.

Highly sexualised and porogative history of the imagers late 60s - early 80s.

 Cook, G. (1992) The Discourse of Advertising, London...

Amy Adler - The Folly of Defining 'Serious' Art
  • professor of law at NY Uni
  • 'an irreconcilable conflict between legal riles and artistic practice'
The Miller Test, 1973
Asks 3 quesions

Obscenity Law

' I think that the pictures are incredibly innocent and totally unsexual.  don't crop them, I don't retouch them and the shots are never staged. I might introduce an element like a mask, to a given situation, but I would never insist that the child put it on.'

Final Thought
Just how much shuld we believe the truth represented in the media?
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?

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