Lee Nutter - Phnom Penh based Photographer

Projected CensorshipJanuary 20, 2015

projected-censorship

This is Bonnie. Wanna know why she’s pulling her hair out?

Several times recently I’ve found myself looking for an ‘Instagram shot’ mid shoot. You know the one. Contrived placement of arms, hair, or deep shadows, not to help tell some kind of story, but to hide the parts of the human anatomy that Facebook and Instagram find too hard to handle. It’s not the picture I want, but it’s the only way I’ll be able to reach the friends, family, and other followers that don’t regularly venture outside of Zuckerberg’s safe zone.

Realizing just how frequently I was searching for these shots, I started to wonder about other possible effects of Facebook and Instagram’s censorship, and how their childish blanket ban on nudity might be affecting the way artists work, or at least the work they produce, share, and make their names with, and if artists gain popularity based on work they only produced in order to comply with the rules and regulations of the social networking service they used to gain popularity, what a pigeonhole they might find themselves in.

At some stage during my ponderings a phrase came to mind:Projected Censorship. So in this way my experiments with projections continued. This time I riffed on the fake masking tape I use to censor some of my Instagram posts, but instead of taping the final image, I taped the projector itself in a strategic way, then projected the censorship tape onto the brave and wonderful Bonnie, thereby projecting censorship, get it?

I guess sometimes imposed limitations can be good for creativity, but I still think Zuckerberg’s policy on nudity is bullshit. And as you can see, Bonnie isn’t happy about it either.

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