Censorship: Dominant Culture- Bezait Ali

The Black Book Rober Mapplethorpe 1986
http://slamxhype.com/art-design/robert-mapplethorpe-retrospective/

Censorship is defined as “the practice of examining and suppressing unacceptable parts” of works of art (oxford dictionaries). Censorship in the 21st Century needs to have a dignified purpose and balance between creativity and right of ownership.  Liz Kotz examines the boundaries of privacy describing it as “ a possibly banal image or even a gruesome one, that triggers a flood of memory, a spark of recognition and a sense that something private and precious has been disclosed to you”(Kotz,Pg207). I would add to this description of privacy that the sharing of something personal is usually at the expense of someone else’s privacy and ownership, which is selected by the photographer to share with whomever, a message about that private thing in the way that the photographer sees it. Mapplethorpe's black nudes photographs bring lots of controversy about the topic of censorship and ownership.


The picture above is a piece from Robert Mapplethorpe’s series of photographs titled The Black Book. I choose this picture because to me the man in the photograph is depicted as an object. His face is not shown; he is unidentifiable which makes the photo all about the look of his body and not about him. In the reading when the black male models are asked how they feel about the pictures taken of them, they described themselves as looking “like a freak”; they would never choose to own their photograph because it did not represent them in the way they see themselves (Mercer,Pg248). Kobena Mercer would argue this is because “the pictures say more about the white male subject behind the camera than they do about the black men whose beautiful bodies we see depicted"(Mercer,Pg238).