“Women are the guardians of that private place and if they censor, however monstrously, they say they do it to protect themselves, their daughters, their culture. Yet, ironically, it is often the misogyny embedded in the cultures they are protecting – whether western or eastern – that makes life so precarious for them.”
Owen, U. (2000; 5)
During my research this month, I came across a publication called Index on Censorship, which as you may guess from the title tackles the topic of censorship. I’ve largely been looking at a 21 year old edition that contains essays on and around the topic of women who censor, as it’s an angle I’ve been greatly reflecting on since I first began researching on the topic, whether by me creating a social commentary on the topic what my impact of authoring work which tackles this topic may mean from an ethical standpoint. Initially I had been experimenting with erasing famous actors with the following intent: ‘History repeats it’s erasure. These famous actors are heralded and remembered, yet the actresses become forgotten and erased; censored by our unsconscious bias…in less than 100 years. And so I question why? What if the opposite held true? And what will happen in the future?‘, however I quickly found my approach, those depicted in Figure 1, as not achieving quite the intent I wanted with the semi-erased male actors looking more like the invisible man than someone censored. Update: 23/03/2021, I showed some of these images in the weekly peer to peer conference to see what was thought and received some very insightful feedback on what was read into the images, one comment was that some of the male actors I had erased were in the closet, and therefore it could be a comment on how this still is not particularly known of them, as it was something they had to keep quiet as being gay at the time was frowned upon. Another comment made was about the pay difference, and remarked that the one area in the film industry where women outrank men on pay and fame is porn.
Figure 1 Murray, J. (2021) Experimentation
My other concern with re-photographing archival images are the ethics of doing so, given the photos in question are from film annuals, and don’t credit the original copyright holders be they photographers or the studio themselves, and whether the actors or their ancestors may take offense at the erasure of them from the photograph. Talking to Laura about these early experimentations, further fueled my decision to go back to my comfort zone of set building, playing with scale and incorporation of the uncanny via the vehicle of dolls, as she agreed that their was something missing from these experiments. Would they work better if I had erased the entire man, hair and clothes leaving the women gazing and leaning on air? I feel Wilson’s comments in Women Who Censor: Index on Censorship (2000) sum up my ultimate concerns with modifying these rephotographed images, are they politically correct enough to not be questioned? She writes:
“If the censorship of silence and denial is insidious, direct censorship, on grounds of ‘political correctness’, can also be hard to combat. The history of art in the West (but not exclusively in the West) is a long history of struggle for the right to free expression, and the ‘culture wars’ that raged through America in the 1980s concerned the right of artists, such as Robert Mapplethorpe, to freedom of expression within a supposedly individualist liberal culture.”
Wilson, E. (2000; 43-44)
Figure 2 Murray, J. (2021) Set Building Progress
This leads to my set building (Figure 2), at the point of writing I’m just completing creating my set up, however the photographs in Figure 2, my current concept is to reference to traditional censorship, specifically book censorship. Book censorship, has a rich history, specifically book burning, with one of the earliest examples recorded occurring in the Qin Dynasty. Ever since, books deemed to be controversial either due to the author or the contents itself, have been subject to traditional book burning or simply outright censorship in publishing. However in the late 1990s the future of book censorship seemed to be past it’s sell-by-date, with Bezos suggesting his online bookselling platform Amazon, would publish “the good, the bad, and the ugly.” (Bezos, J. 1998) leaving it to the consumer to decide. Less than 12 years later, Amazon censored it’s first book and ever since it’s been redefining what is and isn’t acceptable on it’s platform, and in the case of certain books such as Mein Kampf banned then reinstated repeatedly, others such as Orwell’s 1984 have been plagarised re-written and re-contextualised changing the narrative drastically. This modern twist on censoring aligns to other internet censorship – in that it’s not that the object in question is erased entirely or redacted, but forcably changed to a ‘new truth’, that hides the past, and as Wilson comments in 2000 sometimes the censorship is fueled by fear of the past.
“Prudishness, feminist resentment at the way women are treated and depicted, and the fear that often lies behind censorship are tangled together. Caught between the anything-goes amorality of consumer culture and the legacy of a repressive past, women have a difficult balance to maintain.”
Wilson, E. (2000; 44)
References
Figures
Figure 1 Murray, J. (2021) Experimentation
Figure 2 Murray, J. (2021) Set Building Progress
Figure 3 Murray, J. (March 2021) Working Title: Inferno
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Jasmine Murray Photography 
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