So, Which Waxed Male Chest is Offensive and Which Is Not?

The big box retailers Barnes & Noble and Borders reportedly have asked the purveyors of this magazine to wrap the cover before it can go on their shelves. The model, by the way, is male. I wonder if they demanded the same thing when this cover came out:

I recently cited the Rob Lowe cover here. Of course, Barnes & Noble and Borders are not serious booksellers, so the hypocrisy here is somewhat less than it might be. (Mostly, these outfits sell least common denominator crap.) But the local B&N store (in what I suspect is a corporate level campaign) has an annual "Banned Books" window display as though they are defenders of freedom of expression. Beefcakes? Yes. Androgynous types? Not so much.

Australia ~ Photographers Self-Censor

"Stop Or I Won't Shoot!"
Photograph © Linsey Gosper

Australia is a long way off. But here at the other side of the earth we can learn lessons from the Australians. A couple of years back I posted a number of times about the effort there to censor an exhibition by Bill Henson. The fruits of that effort now seem to have ripened. Here are remarks from this essay photographer Linsey Gosper published in The Sydney Morning Herald:

"Censorship prevails, not only through policy, the media and institutions, but more significantly from artists themselves.

From my personal experience as a photographic artist, and from conversing with many diverse Australian photographers, the most common change in the creation of art now is self-censorship."

This is a forthright statement. It will no doubt displease not only the censors but the photographers who are assiduously avoiding them. And the latter will surely condemn Gosper.

I must say I am unsurprised by this analysis. We have seen self-censorship and much less forthright discussions of it elsewhere and for the same reason. So, my question for Ms. Gosper is "what is to be done?" Having written the essay, is there a venue for challenging the oppressive atmosphere in practice?

New Label ~ child porn?

Girl and Cat (1937) ~ Balthasar Klossowski de Rola.

I have posted numerous times here about the travails artists and photographers who have encountered censorship, formal and informal, justified by the fear of "child pornography." At Salon.com you can find this interesting slide show of works (some of which, I've noted in my posts) that have generated "controversy" along this dimension. Most of the images (including the one I've lifted here) are readily available on line. There is no doubt that that makes them available to perverts. But there is no doubt too that museums and media outlets and politicians are way too concerned about the sensitivities of everyday people. There are issues to be discussed and argued over in all this. But blanket censorship seems to me a poor substitute for such interactions.

Lessons of Wikileaks

A system of free expression and other political rights is a pubic good. That means that for most participants in that system - say, corporations - there always is a powerful incentive not to pay the costs required to sustain that good. So when, as Paypal reportedly has admitted and other companies predictably soon also will*, the U.S. Government pressures them to toss commitment to free expression overboard, they will do so with alacrity. Principle goes by the board quickly when profits or legal exposure seem threatened.

The problem is that as Paypal, Mastercard, Visa, Amazon, Everydns.net and PostFinance (the Swiss bank handling funds for Julian Assange's legal defense fund) cut services to Wikileaks, they are acting on the government's allegation that Assange and/or Wikileaks may have committed a crime. To date there are no actual legal charges, let alone convictions in the fracas. And while Joe Lieberman is stomping around demanding that we simply dispense with the first amendment altogether it is not at all obvious that Assange and his compatriots have actually broken any law.

I am not big on conspiracy theories. But as the corporate world capitulates to government demands like this, I am tempted to reassess that propensity. And I wonder why it is that the companies are not nearly so interested in falling into line on say, tax compliance or environmental protections or whatever when the government stops by and says 'pretty please.'

It is important to note that not all the companies that the U.S. Government is pressuring in the anti-Wikileaks campaign have capitulated. According to this report The Guardian, the Swiss firm Switch, which now hosts the Wikileaks web site, is resisting the pressure. Just when one starts to think that all corporations are simply craven here comes a surprise.
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Update (later that same day): *I highly recommend this post by Henry Farrell - who, unlike me, actually knows a lot about this general topic of government interference with the Internet - over at Crooked Timber. No need to take my data free speculation for anything more than what it is.

Censorship and Self-Censorship at the National Portrait Gallery

"For better or worse, the government has made the
decision to fund art. That decision has been vigorously
debated over the past 30 years, and the argument
continues today. But once the decision is taken, does
anyone believe our politicians should be curating the
museums, dictating what is and isn't art?"

The folks over at The Economist pose the question very well in this story. They are addressing the latest (successful) effort by American Christian fundamentalists (in this case Catholics) to dictate cultural standards that comport with their own parochial sensibilities. It is difficult to know who to dislike more in this episode, the offended Christians and the censorious politicos or the craven curator seeking to rationalize his cowardly behavior.

War, Propaganda, Censorship: The Military Reveals the Actual Power Relations "Embedded" in Their Relations to With the News Media

Michael Hastings at the ISAF base in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Photograph © Mikhail Galustov for RollingStone/Redux.

In late June Michael Hastings published this story in Rolling Stone. The picture above accompanied that story which cost a high ranking military officer his job and career. I think Hastings was right to publish the story. To the best of my knowledge, while many commentators questioned the 'propriety' of his doing so, none actually contested the details of what he wrote. Well, it turns out that the military apparently doesn't much want Hastings around any more and has canceled his next scheduled "embed" in Afghanistan. You can read the news here at Mother Jones.*

Is there anyone who is really surprised by this? I'd be surprised if there were. Tit-for-tat, and so forth. What is outrageous is not this decision to kick Hastings to the curb. That is simply authoritarian reflex. Predictable. What is outrageous is that the news media has voluntarily embraced the legitimacy of the entire system of "embedded" reporting. Having done that, they really cannot complain that the military unilaterally dictates the rules of engagement. This episode simply reveals in especially stark form the power relations to which the press has acquiesced.

The press should pride itself on being untrustworthy (which is not the same thing as being dishonest, quite the reverse) when it comes to political and military authorities. In the current context the premium seems to be quite the reverse.
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Update (8/6/2010): More here.

Changing Conventions in War Photography & the Disaster in Afghanistan

U.S. Army soldiers of the 1-320th Alpha Battery, 2nd Brigade of
the 101st Airborne Division, look towards insurgent positions
during a firefight at COP Nolen, in the volatile Arghandab Valley,
Kandahar, Afghanistan, Saturday, July 24, 2010.
(Photograph © AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

Over the course of the afternoon I had an interesting and helpful exchange of comments on this earlier post. My interlocutor, photographer Tim Hetherington, has taken exception to the post, interpreting my comments as questioning his integrity. I certainly did not intend the post in any such way and indeed stated as much at the outset. I apologize to Tim if I created that impression.

Having said all that, I thought it might help to depersonalize the disagreement. Let's not talk about Tim's work. My concerns are two. The first is directly political in the pedestrian sense; it centers on whether whether our troops in Afghanistan are serving our national interest. I stand by my judgment that they are not. They are there enacting a misguided policy. We can argue the question, but I am pretty confident about where the preponderance of evidence will fall.

My second concern has more to do with the politics of photography. Here is the nub of the issue: why is it acceptable to depict our military adventures in Afghanistan with images like the one I discuss here, whereas images like the one I discuss here generate an uproar? My concern is that we are witnessing not just the sort of censorship (and accompanying official rationalizations)* of images of war that prevents the media from showing even flag draped coffins being unloaded at military bases, but also the emergence of a parallel convention wherein we will get sanitized views of war dressed up in tee-shirts and boxers as though the soldiers just happened to be camped out there and came under attack totally by surprise. That is what I meant by visual euphemism.

As if on cue, I just found the image above festooned across the top of the home page at Huffington Post accompanying a story on the publication of classified records of the Afghanistan debacle (here and here too). Given the information that was released today, the confidence I noted above is growing.
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* For examples of censorship see, e.g. [1] [2] [3] ...

The Right to Take Pictures (5)

Photo © Jonathan Warren

"The right to take photographs in the United States is being challenged more than ever. People are being stopped, harassed, and even intimidated into handing over their personal property simply because they were taking photographs of subjects that made other people uncomfortable. Recent examples have included photographing industrial plants, bridges, buildings, trains, and bus stations. For the most part, attempts to restrict photography are based on misguided fears about the supposed dangers that unrestricted photography presents to society.

Ironically, unrestricted photography by private citizens has played an integral role in protecting the freedom, security, and well-being of all Americans. Photography in the United States has an established history of contributing to improvements in civil rights, curbing abusive child labor practices, and providing important information to crime investigators. Photography has not contributed to a decline in public safety or economic vitality in the United States. When people think back on the acts of domestic terrorism that have occurred over the last twenty years, none have depended on or even involved photography. Restrictions on photography would not have prevented any of these acts. Furthermore, the increase in people carrying small digital and cell phone cameras has resulted in the prevention of crimes and the apprehension of criminals.

As the flyer states, there are not very many legal restrictions on what can be photographed when in public view. Most attempts at restricting photography are done by lower-level security and law enforcement officials acting way beyond their authority. Note that neither the Patriot Act nor the Homeland Security Act have any provisions that restrict photography. Similarly, some businesses have a history of abusing the rights of photographers under the guise of protecting their trade secrets. These claims are almost always meritless because entities are required to keep trade secrets from public view if they want to protect them."

I lifted these paragraphs from this web page maintained by attorney Bert Krages. I have linked to his valuable page a number of times. In light of my last post, it seemed appropriate to do so yet again. Krages has a one page pdf detailing your rights when confronted by law enforcement and/or security personnel. He also has written a book entitled Legal Handbook for Photographers that covers a broader range of topics (e.g., intellectual property issues).

BP, the Oil Gusher, and the Constitution

This morning npr ran this story about the harassment of journalists and photojournalists seeking to investigate the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico by law enforcement officials - local, state, and federal - often working in coordination with the U.S. Coast Guard and members of BP's security squad. The hook for the npr story is the encounter between ProPublica photographer Lance Rosenfield with a phalanx of law enforcement and BP security in Texas City, Texas. You can read his own report here. His experience is not unique - see this report and this one too. In each instance the officials - law enforcement or military - claim that they are acting at the behest of the corporation. Apparently the emergency means the Constitution has been suspended.

Self-Censorship and the Uses of Discomfort

From: Immediate Family. Photograph © Sally Mann.

In The Guardian today this a review by Sean O'Hagan of a newly opened retrospective of work by Sally Mann. (You can find an earlier notice here.) Here are two interesting passages. The first addresses an early series of images Mann calls Immediate Family.

"It featured black and white images of her three children, often naked or partially naked, as they played and posed in the woods, lakes and rivers around her home in rural Virginia.

The images, some of which are on show here in the 59-year-old American's first British retrospective, are by turns beautiful, disturbing and unashamedly sensual. Perhaps more problematically, all of them are, to one degree or another, staged. [. . .]

"Many of these pictures are intimate, some fictions and some fantastic," Mann said of the series, "but most are ordinary things that every mother has seen." Well, maybe, but not every mother has restaged and then rendered them in such a darkly beautiful and ambiguous ways. Intriguingly, none of the more outrightly provocative photographs have found their way into this show, which is an edited version of a bigger retrospective exhibition that has already toured Europe. Whether this is down to lack of space or fear of public – or tabloid – outcry is anyone's guess, but one could argue that something has been lost in this excised version of the series: the sense that Mann is walking a tightrope between reflecting childhood sexuality in all its lack of self-consciousness and staging it in often dramatic reconstructions. This, in effect, is where the true power of her art lies.

I will give O'Hagan the benefit of the doubt here and assume he is simply being ironic. Of course the reason the "more provocative" images in the series are not being displayed is that the gallery and/or photographer anticipated public complaints. So, instead of censorship we get anticipatory reaction. If I don't show you the provocative images I won't have to worry about being forced to remove them from the show. In other words, the censors have done their work effectively before the exhibition is even mounted.

Here is the second passage, this one a typically hand-wringing worry about what we have a "right" to show or to see.

The other, even more disturbing series on show here is entitled What Remains (2000–04), which approaches death and dying head on. Mann gained access to the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Centre, a place that would not seem out of place in one of Chuck Palahniuk's darkly humorous short stories. Here, bodies that have been donated to science are left outside in the woods so that the process of organic decomposition can be studied by forensic scientists.

Mann's close-up images of these rotting corpses are not for the faint of heart, but, again, the prints – made by an old-fashioned chemical method called the wet-plate collodion process – have a Victorian feel that is almost painterly. One does, though, feel like a voyeur when looking at images such as this. They raise the ethical question of whether a person's decision to donate their body to science gives scientists the right, at a later date, to grant Mann permission to photograph that – decomposing – body. (And whether the result should then be displayed as art. )

From there O'Hagan quickly turns to the safe subject of photographic technique. Apparently it would be OK for a crime novelist to describe rotting corpses. And it is OK for forensic scientists to study them. And it is OK for us to watch the various CSI programs on television. But Mann's images (stylized as they are) are somehow beyond the pale?

Perhaps, I am wrong, but is O'Hagan here hinting that we ought to self-censor more than we already do? It is difficult to tell since he lauds Mann for her creativity and courage and seems to esteem her work despite "all the uncomfortable issues it raises." Doesn't Mann's work stand as an indictment of censorship and self-censorship? Doesn't it suggest that what we need is to see what photographers show and then engage in critical argument about where the bounds of taste and morality are located? Then photography can contribute in useful ways to self- and social and political exploration and discovery.