- 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
Aronson, E. and Pratkanis, A., 1992, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of
Persuasion, New York, Henry Holt & Co., pages 269 - 270
Kate Winslet on the cover of gq with elongated legs
Robert Capa death of a loyalist soldier 1936
Mexican suitcase containing contact sheets and negatives of photography.
‘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’
Elliot Aronson in Pratkanis and Aronson, (1992), Age of
Propaganda, p. xii
‘With lively step, breasting the wind, clenching their rifles, they ran down the slope covered with thick stubble. Suddenly their soaring was interrupted, a bullet whistled - a fratricidal bullet - and their blood was drunk by their native soil’ – caption accompanying the photograph in Vue magazine
Persuasion - ‘a deliberate and successful attempt by one person to get another person by appeals to reason to freely accept beliefs, attitudes, values, intentions, orations’.Tom L. Beauchamp, Manipulative Advertising, 1984
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
‘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:
1.It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2.It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3.It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4.It bears no relation to any reality whatever : it is its own pure simulacrum.’
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 1981, in Poster, M. (ed.) (1988), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Cambridge, Polity Press, page 173
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 1981, in Poster, M. (ed.) (1988), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Cambridge, Polity Press, page 173
Peter Turnley, The Unseen Gulf War, December 2002, at http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0212/pt_intro.html
“It is a masquerade of Information: branded faces delivered over to the prostitution of the image”
Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did not Take Place, 1995, p.40
‘The claim that the Gulf War of 1990 would not take place (1991), followed by the assertion that it did not take place, seems to defy all logic. Such statements are anticipated by the earlier claim (1983) that the only future war would be a hyperreal and dissuasive war in which no events would take place because there was no more space for actual warfare. The underlying argument is that the Gulf War was asimulated war or a reproduction of a war. Whatever its human consequences, this was, for Baudrillard, a war which consisted largely of its self-representation in the real time of media coverage’
Macey, D. (2000), The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory, London, Penguin, page 34
‘Most of the reporting that reached American audience and the west in general emanated from the Pentagon, hence severely lacking balance, as proven by the total blackout on the magnitude of the devastation and death on the Iraqi side. A quick statement of the number of dead (centered around 100,000 thousands soldiers and 15,000 civilians) sufficed for main-stream media audience. It is no wonder that this made-for-TV war started at 6:30pm EST on January 16, 1991, coinciding with National News. Alas, much of American audience today cannot distinguish between computer war games and real war, between news and entertainment’.
‘Two intense images, two or perhaps three which all concern disfigured forms or costumes which correspond to the masquerade of this war: the CNN journalists with their gas masks in the
Jerusalem studios; the drugged and beaten prisoners repenting on the screen of Iraqi TV; and perhaps that seabird covered in oil and pointing its blind eyes to the Gulf sky. It is a masquerade of information: branded faces delivered over to the prostitution of the image, the image
of an unintelligible distress. No images of the field of battle, but images of masks, of blind or defeated faces, images of falsification. It is not war taking place over there but the Disfiguration of the world’
Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 1995, in Poster, M. (ed.) (1988), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Cambridge, Polity Press, page 241
