This essay is an accompaniment to my project on Refugees and Asylum Seekers currently residing in Greece, to be exhibited at Géographie(s) de l’exil in Paris, 18-21st July.
Part 1: On the Censorship of Photographs
The British art critic John Berger described photography as quoting from appearances. The photograph itself is a matter of truth: light has been captured in an instant and is transformed into an incontrovertible fact, a captured point in time.
Despite this, the decision to take a photograph is never neutral or accidental. Susan Sontag argues, the very act of photographing is the product of ideological choices. The photographer does not simply record reality; they select, frame, edit, and often assert power over the subject, revealing the photographer’s intentions.
Simultaneously, photography is ambiguous. A photograph provides no objective statement justifying its own existence. Instead, any statement made by a photograph is the product of your own subjectivity, and crucially constructed through other contextualities. Berger describes this condition as: “the photograph, irrefutable as evidence but weak in meaning, is given a meaning by the words”. Though as soon as a photograph is provided meaning and context through accompanying words, it will no longer exist as pure truth, because as Roland Barthes suggests, contextuality anchors meaning to a photograph that limits potential interpretation.
Photographs can be and are edited, tampered with and reworked to provide alternative truths (in some cases as art, in others to deliberately misinform). However, it can be argued that when this occurs then they cease to be photographs, and become instead a different medium entirely. The very act of altering a photograph imbues it with meaning, a new context, much in the same way that words can.
In obscuring a person within a photograph, censorship appears to subtract truth. To remove a face or a body is to challenge the factuality of that person’s presence: to revoke their agency and render them anonymous, even disposable. Censorship is thus often seen as a purely redactive act, one that strips meaning and visibility.
Yet, I argue that the censorship of photographs can generate as much meaning in an image as it removes. Rather than a purely redactive act, censorship should itself be understood as a semiotic intervention: a communicative gesture not unlike written language, shaping interpretation through absence as much as presence. To channel Barthes, the removal of visual information can therefore direct, not diminish, the image’s interpretive potential.
Take this image of the Shah for example, what can we discern from this? Here we have two images, the defaced portrait of the Shah of Iran, and the photograph taken of it.
I know nothing about this photograph besides what I can presume. I presume it was taken in 1979, or thereabouts. I presume that the portrait has been placed in this bin sometime following its defacement, by supporters of the Islamic Revolution, or perhaps merely by anyone supporting the achievement of the Shah’s overthrow.
Looking at the portrait itself, it is grand, official. He, king of kings, donning full regalia in a photograph which looks as though it could have been taken at a ceremony. From this, we might presume it has been stripped from the walls of the bureaucracy, a school or the home of a particularly diligent loyalist.
We can presume from the stillness of the photograph all of the action is already over at this point, that the portrait has been thrown into the street and vandalised there, or perhaps it was carried out and placed directly in the bin, only to be vandalised then on. We can’t know whether it was a solitary act of catharsis or a mass protest, but that ambiguity is precisely the point.
The truth of the image does not provide answers to these questions, thus we are left only to make presumptions. These presumptions are determined by two factors: my subjective understanding of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and the photograph itself, which I interpret as evidence of those events. However, it is the censorship of the portrait of the Shah within the photograph which is of most interest to me, as it provides some additional meaning to the events I could only speculate upon previously.
In his disfigurement, the Shah has been blinded by the people. There are several interpretations we can make of this as we must presume there is significant symbolic purpose behind it. In the Tusculan Disputations the Roman writer Cicero states: “The face is a picture of the mind as the eyes are its interpreter”, and whilst we have no good reason to believe those that disfigured the Shah were great followers of Cicero, could we take the interpretation that the purpose of removing the eyes of the Shah was to strip him of his capacity to interpret, to rid him of his agency, and thus ultimately to extinguish his humanity in revolutionary Iranian society?
If we were now to apply that which we already know from other sources about the lead up to the Islamic Revolution, one could infer that the blinding of the Shah may reference the (end of) surveillance activities of the Shah’s SAVAK secret police and intelligence network.
We can also make interpretations based on what hasn’t been censored. The image is still, recognisably, the Shah, which suggests the objective of the defacement was not to erase him from memory but instead specifically to remove his sight.
This then provides us some interpretation for the motives and context behind and within this photograph. The censorship has added something.
Let us now move on to another example of direct censorship.
Merely from looking at this next image, there appears significantly less we can determine. We see the shroud of a portrait. It is clear that the photograph is from the first half of the twentieth century, and judging by the lighting and the depth of field we can presume it is a professional portrait, probably taken on a large format camera.
There is some context we can gain from the words connected to this image: those who know Uzbek will ascertain that this person once held a high political office in the Soviet Union.
We who do not know Uzbek have now ascertained that this person was once removed from a high political office in the Soviet Union.
The name of this person is unknown to us (it is only possible for us to learn the name because of those who have refused to forget it).
The nature of this defacement is far cruder than that of the Shah. At first glance the objective of this censorship was not to remove this figure of their agency, but was to remove them from historical memory. The defacement is crude and effective: we cannot tell who this person is, their sex, from what community they are from, their age or their religion. They have been dehumanised. Yet it beckons the question of why this portrait was not instead destroyed completely, and its subject thus extracted from history entirely? We then must consider that it was left this way for a reason, and one possible interpretation of why it was left to remain in this state is that the preservation of the context provided by the writing underneath is supposed to provide a meaning to the viewer: this person once held high political office, and they too were removed.
And what of this image, taken from the 2017 Al-Jazeera article titled “Abu Ghraib: The legacy of torture in the war on terror”, detailing the systemic torture and abuse of Iraqis by US Military and Intelligence forces.
What does this censorship say to us? One might presume that it is there to protect the identity (and thus perhaps the dignity) of those in the images. After all, the Al-Jazeera article helpfully quotes the Red Cross in reminding us that “approximately 70-90 percent of the prisoners were mistakenly detained” in Abu Ghraib by the US occupation. Were we to move forward with this presumption that the people in these photographs have had their faces censored to protect their identity, does it not still have the effect of stripping them of their subjectivity, their agency, and their humanity?
What ethical questions must we then consider if the protection of one’s identity is intrinsically tied to divorcing them of their humanity?
What happens if I reintroduce the context of these photographs, and tell you that these images from Abu Ghraib were instead censored upon release by the perpetrators of the abuses against these men. Is the censorship then intended to protect the identities of the subjects, or more so to discard them of their humanity? And how do we understand the notion that their humanity eludes us still as to protect the torturers? Does the meaning we take from these images change considerably now the context has changed, even though the truth of the image remains the same?
Censorship then, is not a neutral act of omission, it is a semiotic gesture. As Roland Barthes argues, meaning is never fixed within the image itself but is shaped by its cultural and ideological context. A censored photograph does not merely withhold information, it communicates. It produces new meanings through its very act of suppression. If, as in this case, the context of who has censored the photographs of Abu Ghraib’s victims changes how we perceive the act of censorship itself, then censorship must not only be seen as redaction, but must be read as a form of message.
Part 2: On the Censorship of Refugees in Europe
The means in which Refugees and Asylum seekers are censored in Europe are numerous, and go far beyond the premeditated censorship of faces in photographs.
Their voices are most often absent in News Media by the direction of editorial boards, or resulting from the distastes and cowardice of many traditional journalists. Refugees and Asylum Seekers are almost overwhelmingly represented negatively as critical problems in mainstream European press, and are frequently spoken about in the News Media, but are seldom provided a platform to speak for themselves (a proven method in which popular attitudes can shift for the better on the topic of refugees and asylum seekers), effectively censoring them out of those discussions that most intimately involve them. Without their voices, and under the control of a propaganda model of media ownership (as it exists in most of Europe), the topic of migration is thus simplified into widely circulated and potentially dangerous myths that manufactures popular consent against the interests of Refugees and Asylum Seekers, directly resulting in anti-refugee discourse within society and punitive and discriminatory policy within political platforms. Here, Refugees and Asylum Seekers lack legitimate political power and representation, and are thus isolated from political debates and conversations regarding their very existence.
Additionally, that which concerns Refugees and Asylum Seekers is suppressed on Digital Media, either by the hand of censors, or as is becoming more common, the biases of increasingly AI-led algorithms. Social Media once existed as a platform for Refugees and Asylum Seekers to take ownership of and agency over narratives regarding their own lives, combatting false and misleading narratives depicted and perpetuated in traditional media. However, contemporary trends in Digital Media governance has reduced the ability for all of us, though especially Refugees and Asylum Seekers, to use Social Media as a political tool for exchanging information, organisation and self-expression.
And perhaps what might come as most surprising to those of us who do not possess lived experience as a Refugee or Asylum Seeker, is quite how significantly self-censorship is used on a daily basis, an occurrence entirely culpable to the fabric of contemporary European Society. Refugees and Asylum Seekers have self-censored so as to avoid violence, persecution and repression from the state, from fascists, or from liberal and conservative media. Self-censorship is used when there is fear that stories from their home countries may be used against them for fear of infiltration within their own communities. There is also evidence of pressure to self-censor when speaking to the media, changing the truths of their realities to fit politically convenient narratives.
And beyond just the linguistic suppression of spoken or written work, self-censorship amongst Refugees and Asylum Seekers extends to the self-censorship of material commodities. Widespread is now the auto-restriction of and access to mobile phones and other digital communication devices so as to circumvent the swelling panopticon of machinated digital surveillance in Europe’s borders and cities, designed to track and manipulate their movements.
In the present work exhibited, the censorship is clear. You are taught that this form of censorship is the work of authoritarian regimes from our collective history, used to erase humans from memory.
All too often are Asylum Seekers refused entry or stay in a country because of seemingly innocent photographs used against them. A photograph of you smiling in the country you claimed was unsafe will be weaponised against you. Why, after all, would you be smiling if you felt unsafe there? All too often will photographs of migrants, irrespective of context, be used by the right-wing, fascists and their friends in the media to breed hostile narratives (and thus hostility) against them, or to aid in their persecution.
We censor these photographs not to erase humanity, but because to reveal identity would be to endanger it, putting people at risk of violence from the same forces that censor to disremember, to disenfranchise, to disempower them, to alienate, to subjugate and to interpellate them.
This contradiction, the dehumanisation inherent in censorship, is and must remain a considerable ethical dilemma for photographers working alongside Refugees and Asylum Seekers.
Harry.
The photographs as part of this project will appear here at the time of the exhibition.
Sources:
Al Jazeera, 2017. Abu Ghraib: The legacy of torture in the war on terror. [online] Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2017/10/1/abu-ghraib-the-legacy-of-torture-in-the-war-on-terror/.
Barthes, R., 2009. Mythologies. Translated by A. Lavers. London: Vintage
Battaglia, L.S., 2018. Behind our silence: Refugees feel that they are not allowed to give their views in public in case they upset their new nation, they tell our interviewer. Index on Censorship, 47(1), pp.81-83.
Berger, J., 2013. Understanding a photograph. Edited by G. Dyer. London: Penguin Books.
Cicero, M.T., 45 BC. Tusculan Disputations.
Herman, E.S. and Chomsky, N., 1988. Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. New York: Pantheon Books.
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 2004. Report on the treatment by the Coalition Forces of prisoners of war and other protected persons by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq during arrest, internment and interrogation. Geneva: ICRC. Available at: https://www.derechos.org/nizkor/us/doc/icrc-prisoner-report-feb-2004.pdf
Nagy, V., 2024. Social sorting in Europe: Self-censorship in a digital asylum. Archiwum Kryminologii, 1(XLVI), pp.149-179.
Sontag, S., 1977. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Philo, G., Briant, E. & Donald, P., 2013 Bad News for Refugees. London: Pluto Press.
Wells, A., 2024. Digital refugee resistance, power, representation and algorithmic censorship. Forced Migration Review, (73), pp.1-4.
Images:
Image 1 - IRANIAN REVOLUTION, 1979 Defaced portrait of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in a trash can in Tehran, shortly following the Shah's departure from the country in January 1979. - Granger / Bridgeman Images
Image 2 - A portrait of Djakhan Abidova, a woman in the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, deliberately damaged as part of an effort to erase her in the nineteen-thirties. - Samuel Cole / Tate
Image 3 - Black strips placed by censors mask the identity of detainees in an undated combination of photos from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison released in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. - Reuters.
