“Like their counterparts in Hollywood, photographic retouchers in Soviet Russia spent long hours smoothing out the blemishes of imperfect complexions, helping the camera to falsify reality. Joseph Stalin’s pockmarked face, in particular, demanded exceptional skills with the airbrush. But it was during the Great Purges, which raged in the late 1930s, that a new form of falsification emerged. The physical eradication of Stalin’s political opponents at the hands of the secret police was swiftly followed by their obliteration from all forms of pictorial existence.
Photographs for publication were retouched and restructured with airbrush and scalpel to make once famous personalities vanish. Paintings, too, were often withdrawn from museums and art galleries so that compromising faces could be blocked out of group portraits. Entire editions of works by denounced politicians and writers were banished to the closed sections of the state libraries and archives or simply destroyed.”
King, D. (1997; 1)
As I have mentioned on previous posts, the notion of modern censorship is not vastly different to historic censorship, it’s merely an expansion using developments in technology. And even then the censorship in question is not necessarily visible to the general public. Lewis Bush’s Shadows of the State (2015-2018) highlights an example of censorship – specifically state driven military and political censorship of presumed knowledge hidden in broadcasts by number stations, which to this day we the public can but only speculate on their function and what they may be transmitting. Were they really instructions to agents or merely psychological warfare to taunt an enemy state with? The origins themselves are still shrouded in mystery, the locations of still live sites mere guesses based on triangulation data.
On the subject of Lewis Bush, he has also produced a zine Stryker (2017) which creates an narrative from photographs destroyed by hole punch by FSA’s Roy Stryker. Stryker’s holepunching of negatives whilst curating FSA photographers submitted rolls of film, to which images were acceptable and which were not, rendered unpublishable by his use of defaced vandalistic hole punching, a form of sanitization censorship. Strangely this form of vandalisation has arguably made otherwise mundane images be visually interesting in imagining what has been removed, the uncanniness of where Stryker chose to hole punch and ethical questions on curation and news suppression.
Subsequently the obscuration has inspired artists to react to suppression with the likes of Etienne Chambaud, Bill McDowell, William E. Jones and Lisa Oppenheim responding to Stryker’s censorship directly or indirectly. Oppenheim’s Killed Negatives: After Walker Evans (Figure 3) is a direct response to Stryker’s hole punching in that Oppenheim recreates a conceptual abstract suggestion of what is missing from the original.
Stryker’s approach of sanitization is a particularly destructive method, especially in comparison to the manipulated, constant redacting form of photo censorship employed by the propaganda arm of Stalin’s Russia. This approach of censoring via less than obvious retouching is not necessarily apparent to any viewer, unless they have seen the original or note something suspect such as an artefact within the retouched image in question.
Stalin is not the only dictator to have adopted this process as means of censoring out individuals he no longer wished to be associated with, Mao Zedong and Hitler for example erased Goebbals leaving behind a ghostly halo of his presence. This approach to propaganda persists to this day, though with the rise of digital technology the process of doing so has become simplified and harder to spot, with the likes of Kim Jung Un removing his Uncle, one of his former close advisor’s presence from all images.
Figure 6 Murray, J. (April 2021) WIP: Untitled.
In regards to privacy woes and the internet sanitization censorship has become increasingly popular in the form of traditional censor bars, pixelization and fogging to hide individuals identity, specifically of the face, arguably a modern take on whitewashing, rather than taking paint to brush and masking areas such as illustrated church walls with white paint, tools such as Photoshop blur, pixellate or simply block out contentious areas. Given the rise of the deep fake distorting the reality and the lines of the Uncanny, this practice feels as though it will become more prevalent and a societal norm to avoid our images, our identity being taken hostage inserting things we didn’t say or do. Women in particular, have a lot to worry about with the rise of deep fake, especially when you factor sites I have covered at the beginning of this module, which deliberately produce artificial and fake stripped images, and the reddit phenomenon a few years back of deep fake celeb porn, which placed celebrity women’s head onto existing porn films. This line of thinking led to the development of Figure 6(a) where the female is censored with a box on her head to avoid the scenarios and being effectively victim blamed for her existence, or behaviour. (As I felt the images were not flowing as I would like, I have boosted the blue in tone, in the hopes the narrative I desire to show is more natural and fluid).
This leads me to Cyberphunks (2012) where Assange comments in the introduction that: “The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.” (Assange, J. et al. 2012; 1) Nearly a decade on, it has become more clear to the average consumer that the internet is as much a shackle of confinement in regards to content placed into the public domain as it is freedom. The rise of the big four during Web 2.0 and subsequent developments of deep fakes, artificial intelligence and augmented reality challenge the authenticity and truthfulness of the internet and it’s content.
References
Figures
Figure 1 Bush, L. (2018) Spread from ‘Shadows of the State’. [Online] Available from: https://gupmagazine.com/interview/shadows-of-the-state-an-interview-with-lewis-bush/ [Accessed 10/04/2021]
Figure 2 Bush, L. & Stryker, R. (2017) Stryker. [Online] Available from: https://shop.lewisbush.com/product/stryker-zine/ [Accessed 10/04/2021]
Figure 3 Oppenheim, L. (2007-2009) Killed Negatives: After Walker Evans . [Online] Available from: https://www.are.na/block/561144 [Accessed 10/04/2021]
Figure 4 Getty Images (1930s) Nikolai Yezhov, pictured right of Stalin, was later removed from this photograph at the Moscow Canal. [Online] Available from: https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-retouching [Accessed 11/04/2021]
Figure 5 Unknown (Left: 1937 – Edited: 1940s) Hitler & the disappearance of Goebbels. [Online] Available from: https://www.theverge.com/2012/10/12/3489356/is-this-shopped-truth-lies-and-art-before-and-after-photoshop [Accessed 09/04/2021]
Figure 6 Murray, J. (April 2021) WIP: Untitled.
Figure 7 Naim, M. & Bennett, P. (2014) The 21st Century Censorship Matrix. [Online] Available from: https://archives.cjr.org/cover_story/21st_century_censorship.php [Accessed 08/04/2021]
Figure 8 Assange, J. et al. (2012) Censorship Pyramid. [Online] Available from: https://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/book-reviews/16631-cypherpunks-freedom-and-the-future-of-the-internet [Accessed 09/04/2021]
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Jasmine Murray Photography 