CENSORSHIP
Censorship, in its broadest sense, can be used to
indicate the suppression and restriction of written
and visual materials on a variety grounds, be they
socio-political, economic, moral, or aesthetic. The
forms taken by censors are similarly diverse, and
can include racial, ethnic, or religious groups, gov-
ernment agencies, social organizations, corpora-
tions, educational institutions, even the creator of
a work in question. Beyond these vague para-
meters, however, censorship resists more precise
definition, mainly due to the vast multiplicity of
agendas to which a censor may subscribe. For
some, censorship may be used as a protective mea-
sure against an existing verbal or visual assault; for
others, it may function as a preemptive strike
against an individual or faction who is construed
as a threat to the larger group. Regardless of the
specific circumstances, censorship is fundamentally
about control, and having that power acknowl-
edged both internally and externally.
That censorship has been so prevalent insofar as
photography is concerned is due in large part to the
nature of the medium, as photographic prints can
be easily reproduced and then disseminated over
great distances, whereas paintings and sculpture
are difficult and time-consuming to reproduce,
and are generally viewed in the context of a gallery
or museum. Moreover, the apparent naturalism and
assumed objectivity of the photographic image—as
opposed to one that is hand-drawn—has contribu-
ted greatly to the notion that photography is a con-
siderably more dangerous and volatile medium.
This is perhaps best exemplified by a trial in New
Zealand in 1917, which found a photograph of
Giorgione’s paintingSleeping Venushanging in a
shop window to be ‘‘indecent.’’ Due to pressure
from the United States Postal Service’s policing of
nudity in photographs, Eastman Kodak established
a private censorship operation in 1949.
Times of war are especially prone to censorship,
as governments have often sought to use photo-
graphic media to fashion an acceptable view of
conflict for the civilian population. American jour-
nalists of the First and Second World Wars were
subject to the regulatory influence of military cen-
sors, who sought to protect the general populace
from viewing graphic images of dead and wounded
soldiers. The extensive censorship of media images
by the United States government during wartime
was partially alleviated by the development of the
wire services in the 1930s, which enabled news
services such as the Associated Press to send images
quickly over telephone wires. While the conflicts
from Vietnam through to the more recent cam-
paigns in the Middle East continue to be under-
stood mostly through televised news reports, it is
often isolated images that circumvent censors and
elicit powerful reactions from civilians. Further
complicating this issue is the use of the largely
unregulated Internet for the dissemination of digi-
tal photographs, which will have an enormous
effect on the methods of control and management
of information in the future.
The thriving avant garde around the Bauhaus in
Dessau and Berlin was squashed by the rising tide
of Nazism in Germany, which resulted in the clos-
ing of the school and the threatening of its instruc-
tors. As often is the case, results of censorship can
be unpredictable. The fleeing from censorship and
oppression by such figures as La ́szlo ́Moholy-Nagy
or Herbert Bayer brought them productively to the
United States, where their work had even greater
influence. Decades of tight governmental control in
China, which allowed only certain subject matter as
suitable for photographing, resulted in a veritable
flood of creativity in the field once censorship was
relaxed in the 1990s.
Censorship of photography as an instrument of
politicalandsocialcontrolhasalsobeenusedtostifle
perceived internal conflicts, most notably during the
Cold War in the United States, which saw the govern-
ment exert its enormous influence against the threat
of communism by disbanding organizations judged
to be subversive. The crusade against what were con-
sidered identifiably communistic tendencies in mod-
ern art led to the 1947 blacklisting of The Photo
League, a group of mainly left-leaning photographers
who published a newsletter,Photo Notes.ThePhoto
League counted amongst its members some of the
most influential figures in American photography,
including Lewis Hine, Paul Strand, Walter Rosen-
blum, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, W. Eugene
Smith, Lisette Model, as well as other photographers
formerly employed by the Farm Security Administra-CENSORSHIP