Learning from history

Compared to a display in a sex-shop window by Port Philip Councillor Andrew Bond, parts of Paul Yore's photo collage Everything Is Fucked at St Kilda's Linden Gallery were seized by local police on Saturday after a week of controversy in the local press. No charges have been laid, although News and Fairfax media are speculating loudly about "child pornography offences". Link. Link. Link.

The police raid came a month after LNP Queensland Senator and Shadow Attorney General George Brandis passionately defended both free speech and artistic freedom in an address to the Sydney Institute on May 7. ALP State MP Martin Foley, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Arts, used his Twitter account to "oppose Liberal Party taking us back 60 years". Liberal State MP Clem Newton-Brown tweeted back "I'm curious @martinfoleymp as to whether you are still defending the works of this artist today?"

The police raid came nearly one year to the day after the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee tabled its "Report on the Review of the National Classification Scheme: achieving the right balance" in the Australian Senate.  Chaired by the former Liberal Senator for Tasmania Guy Barnett, the committee examined the role of Australia's national classification scheme (NCS) in the visual arts and the application of the NCS to works of art and the role of artistic merit in classification decisions.

I'm quoting the Arts Law Centre here because the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee's actual report seems to have disappeared from the Australian Senate's website.

The Australian Arts-Law centre commented:


Despite the media hype, the Committee did not recommend the classification of all artworks by the Classification Board. Fundamentally their approach appears to be "business as usual" but encourages artists to take a responsible self-censorship approach

The committee commends the actions of artists who have sought classification of their work prior to public exhibition or display. In the committee's view, obtaining classification assists in ensuring that audiences can be provided with appropriate advice (and, where necessary, warnings) regarding the nature of the artwork.

To this end, the Report notes that the cost of classification of artworks is problematic for artists and recommends that classification of artworks should be exempt from classification fees (Recommendation 7) 

There is a process for applying for a fee waiver outlined on the Classification Board's website.


The Commonwealth Classification (Publications, Films and Computer Games) Act 1995 defines Australia's classification and censorship system as a cooperative scheme between all the States and Territories of Australia. Enforcement of the scheme is through a Classification Enforcement Act enacted by State and Territory, with the Australian Classification Board (ACB) acting as a national clearing house.

The ACB was asked to review photographs by Bill Henson seized from  the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Paddington in 2008. The Board said its review found nudity in the photographs was "mild and justified".

Most artworks would not need to be classified to be exhibited in Australia. An exception  is for what the ACB calls submittable publications - those which contain material that would cause them to be restricted to adults if they were classified. This includes material that is unsuitable for a minor to see or read, or material that is likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult.

Artists, curators and galleries may submit works to the ACB to be evaluated, for a fee. The fee may be waived at the Board's discretion.


A NSW working party on Child Pornography observed (pdf)

Artists found to legitimately exercise artistic purpose should not have their work legally defined in the same way as the horrific images that pervade the Internet of child sexual abuse. To do otherwise is to undermine the gravamen of the exploitation and abuse of children that does occur in the creation, possession and dissemination of child pornography, both in Australia and overseas. (p22)

The Australian classification system provides certainty, and protection from political agendas,  for artists, curators and galleries involved in the planning of a public exhibition of works which may be controversial. It is lamentable, and kind of contemptuous of all the hard work done in this area over the past two decades, that the Linden Gallery management followed an ultimately failed policy of both assuming an exemption from the classification regime, and simultaneously issuing a self-assessed advisory, outside of the national framework, to visitors.

On Photography - Piss Christ and Kulturkampf

I don’t believe in culture. Don’t believe artists produce it, for example, or that television advertisements create it. Analysis of culture, for example from a marxist perspective on capitalist monopolies, or from an epidemiological perspective on the causes of violence, require some initial leap of faith: you have to believe in culture as deterministic, cause and affect, a mechanism, or a force-field, when there is scant evidence of any of those.

In many theoretical perspectives culture is presented as a fog that needs peering through, an organisational chart, a guided tour rather than a lived experience. The word is a handy generalization, sure. You can look at the edges, borders and overlaps between geographies, histories, circumstances, and what those might have in difference or in common. But boundaries, epistemologies and zeitgeists are fluid, liminal, shifting, and no great help for getting to the heart of what's inside.

It would be dishonest, though, to leave what are popularly called the culture wars out of a discussion of modern photography. Conjoining culture and war leaves an impression in my mind of...something shapeless and vague, shadows in twilight perhaps, or Goya's giants endlessly bludgeoning each other.

Thinking about this is further complicated by the strategy I’m using that follows  Elaine Scarry’s critique of aesthetic critiques in On Beauty And Being Just. I’m using beauty in the sense of notability, like that black eye is a real beauty, or (from football) what a mark, you beaut!. Something notable, in other words, rather than something of beauty in the ordinary sense of being pleasing to the eye. Elaine Scarry wrote:

The political critique of beauty is composed of two parts. The first urges that beauty, by preoccupying our attention, distracts attention from wrong social arrangements.
and
The second argument holds that when we stare at something beautiful, make it an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the object.
(Elaine Scarry (2006) On Beauty And Being Just, Duckworth, London, pp58)

Both arguments are in play in consideration of Andres Cerrano’s photograph Piss Christ. The photograph itself is described here, the artist’s website is here. I didn’t see the photograph when it was exhibited. I’m not familiar with the artist’s work, methods or rationale, or the series of photographs of objects in fluids of which it is part. My interest here is solely in the idea that its exhibition in Melbourne is storied as an engagement in a larger war of and on culture.

It will be no help referring to European statesman Otto Von Bismarck's difficulties with Catholicism in 1870s Western Europe, or referencing early twentieth century Italian Marxism, or the 1933 Säuberung.

I want to leapfrog those ideas into recent experience, into modern Melbourne. A further complication for me is some ideas from the study of macro economics. I have no background in the study of economics at all, but I am going to borrow ideas about exchanges from discourses on macro economics. My (limited) understanding is not all exchanges have to do with money, some are to do with ideas and associations and even making friends, but nevertheless play their part in a whole that is often, but not always, described as an economy.

The facts are straightforward. Pre publicity for an exhibition of Andres Cerrano’s photographs at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1997 saw the photograph or its description included in prominent print and electronic media. The Catholic Church in Australia sought an order preventing the photograph from public display at the gallery in the Victorian Supreme Court, arguing precedents in both Canon and Common Law on blasphemous libel.

The Catholic Church argued "Both the name and the image Piss Christ not only demean Christianity but also represent a grossly offensive, scurrilous and insulting treatment of Christianity's most sacred and holy symbol. It is calculated to outrage the feelings of Catholics and other Christians."

The National Gallery of Victoria argued the photograph had been the subject of a television documentary, published in newspapers and books and its exhibition would not add to any perceived offence against the Catholic Church.

The Victorian Supreme Court rejected the application as having no foundation in law, and found no legal basis to prevent the exhibition.  "A plural society such as contemporary Australia operates best where the law need not bother with blasphemous libel," the court decided.

In the week after the exhibition opened the photograph was vandalised twice, leading to the arrest of three men, two of whom had acted in concert. Concerned that it could not prevent such determined attacks, gallery management closed the exhibition.

Using the term ‘calculated’ to describe the production and exhibition of this image places ideas about determinism, conspiracy, authenticity, and deception on the table. To paraphrase: blasphemous libel is a wrong social arrangement. In labelling the photograph art, including it in an exhibition, making it on object of sustained regard, the gallery is a willing accomplice to, or alternatively an unwitting element in, an overarching - devilish perhaps - subterfuge.

Holding the photograph in high regard certainly led to attempts to destroy it. But there is no evidence to support the existence of a calculating, conspiratorial, organized enemy force, no sign of an evil empire poised to make revolution for or against ideology, national self-determination or even religion. If it really were an engagement of a culture war there are no visibly organised protagonists beyond a few  ivory towers blasting away at each other’s values at megaphone volume.

The photograph did not produce a force field that compelled individuals to act in these ways. The artist didn’t produce a predetermined train of events. With no epidemiology of violence to trace, and no rapacious capitalist to blame, or media personality to boycott, the episode has become a muted controversy over artistic and curatorial freedom. But it is explicable in terms of spontaneity and self-organisation, terms often used to describe market economies and a free exchange of goods, or in this case ideas.

Arguments for and against exhibiting the work became more sophisticated. The second act of vandalism was more determined and certainly more complex, and through use of distraction and concurrent action, demonstrably more innovative than the first. These might not be predicted in theories of culture, but they are predicted and comprehensible in theories of markets. I guess the absence of any concrete transaction, for example money for service, undermines an economic perspective. But call the events a series of exchanges, rather than transactions for profit, with outcomes the result of self-organisation rather than any centrality of planning, and you get a glimpse of a free population testing, contesting, reformulating, rejigging, muddling through, as one economist I read put it, one way and another, the limits of its own freedom.

It just might be, from a secular Australian perspective,  that is all the culture wars are.

The last post in this series is here

On Photography - damned either way

Public interest in wrong social arrangements are the heart of most photographic controversies.

Two images come to mind in particular that illustrate tests of public interest,  one far too ordinary, the other not ordinary enough. Both were said, by contemporaries, to distract from, or amplify, somehow, wrong social arrangements.

There is a photograph archived in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, of  Alexandra Feodorovna, Anastasia and Olga Nikolaevna bathed in light, women of the Russian royal family in 1915, seemingly unposed.  The family are busy with needlework, one has her feet up, relaxed, ordinary, familiar even: there is a wrinkled rug in the foreground.  It feels candid, unforced, intimate, real, a photo from a family album, although it is not any more.  It is a moment and a history all at once, and now part of a greater story the library's collection frames - revolution, dislocation, suffering, murder. But perhaps "rare" is a somewhat misleading description: after the Soviet Union disbanded an estimated 150, 000 photographs of the Russian royal family were discovered in secret government archives, suppressed,  in the public interest, from public view by their communist successors for nearly 100 years

There is a photograph of film star Julia Roberts by Mario Testino for a L'Oreal cosmetics advertising campaign in 2010, happy, bright-eyed and unblemished. The photograph  and advertising campaign was banned by the British Advertising Standards Authority after complaints from Scottish  Liberal Democrat member of parliament Jo Swinson that the images were digitally altered, and "not representative of the results the product could achieve." Swinson is a long time campaigner against what she describes as overly perfect and unrealistic images of women in magazines and advertisements.

Communist political parties are, of course, long time campaigners against royal families. But it seems to me that the absence of any regal trappings in the photograph, the ordinariness of the setting and the commonplace and all too human appearance of the Russian royal family posed the greatest threat to the new russian ruling class.  Demonising a ruling elite is one thing. Disappearing women that look like someones sister, aunt or wife is something else altogether. The humanity of the women that belies perceptions of wrong social arrangements had to be disappeared as well.

In modern times it is "overly perfected and unrealistic images of women", and the "deification of beauty", that must be disappeared. Photographs of supermodel Christy Turlington and actress  Rachel Weisz have also disappeared from English magazines. Ms Swinson told the UK Daily Mail  there was sound medical evidence that faked - airbrushed or photoshopped -  images cause harm. "There needs to be much more diversity in advertising – different skin colours, body shapes, sizes and ages."

What was ideologically impermissible somewhere a century ago is essential to the public interest somewhere now. In parts of the world such contradictions are avoided by suppressing images of human bodies altogether. In Western tradition, the human body is central to our humanist  heritage and what we think and say about ourselves, although depictions of it are often contested.


Upon the Protestant reformation the Catholic Church compiled and circulated huge lists of forbidden books, and demanded the censorship of painting:

... all lasciviousness be avoided; in such wise that figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust...

Seventeenth Century poet, polemicist and propagandist John Milton is often quoted arguing against clerical censorship:

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties (1644)

Ironically, by 1744, Samuel Johnson was observing that a century of democratization of writing and publishing had rendered traditional systems for evaluating their worth shambolic. It was easy to publish and obtain books but difficult to trust their contents.

There are echoes of Johnson's world-weariness in controversies on photography today, and echoes of the old religious and political dogmas in conversations about them. Ironically, it may be that the failure of both religious dogma and political ideology to solve problems of wrong social arrangements that keep those controversies relevant.


The Australian Christian Lobby argued

...it is problematic to measure community standards by the number of complaints generated by a a particular broadcast or telecast. It would come as news to a great number of people within the community to learn that their view of the contemporary media environment was judged solely on their formally complaining...  (2011 Submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee Inquiry into the Australian film and literature classification scheme pp10)


Historian Ross Fitzgerald wrote in the Canberra Times

...the fact that an image or a bunch of words may offend someone and is therefore a reason to ban or severely restrict them is a Draconian and intolerant position. I'm offended by lots of things these days - Question Time, alcohol and cigarettes sold in supermarkets, reality TV and religious fundamentalism - but I don't use this as a reason to try to ban these things merely because it's just my opinion.

A very modern case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

The previous post on this topic is here

On Photography - An Angry Country?

Much has been written about the 2008 seizure of Australian artist Bill Henson’s photographs, and their subsequent restoration to his Sydney dealer, innocent, along with the artist, of overwrought allegations against them.

Child protection campaigners labelled Henson’s images of a nude thirteen year-old pornographic. Art critics argued the images were, well, art. Ultimately the independent Office of Film and Literature Classification gave the images a PG (Parental Guidance advisory) classification, and State prosecutors advised the child pornography charges against the artist would not succeed.

Watching an art gallery’s contents emptied into a truck on television I was grateful to whoever had thought the operation through: the police seizing artworks weren’t visibly armed. Later, as Henson’s photographs disappeared from the walls of Australian public spaces I wondered for how long?

There is, rightly, a great deal of sympathy and support for child protection campaigners. And like any other special interest involved in the political process those campaigners are expected to vigorously prosecute their agendas. However, as noted by sociologist Frank Ferudi and others, populist policy actors of all colours who adopt child protection agendas as their own simply cannot be trusted to act upon anything except self-interest, in the end. There have been some notable witch hunts in modern times that have ended without any beneficial outcomes at all, save for the self-advancement of those involved.

Worse, rapists have had their sentences cut, and victims brought to tears and bewilderment as newspapers seek to increase circulation with name and shame gambits. Criminal investigations, especially those involving crimes against children, have not been well served by regimes of continuous speculation. And there is evidence - for example the labelling of corporations as pedophiles - that the current panic over child protection serves only the political ends of ivory towers. Frank Furedi wrote:

Mention the word ‘child’ and people will listen. Raise the moral stakes by claiming that a ‘child is at risk’ and people will not just listen but endorse your demand that ‘something must be done’. For instance, campaigners against poverty understand that they are far more likely to gain sympathy for their cause by focusing attention on what is now called ‘child poverty’. It is as if abstract socio-economic injustices are simply not compelling enough on their own terms: they have to be recast as something afflicting children

Spiked Editor Brendan O'Neill writes: 

Everyone treats the ideal or at least the word freedom seriously. Everyone pays lip service to it...This does not mean, however, that freedom as a lived experience is not under threat. It absolutely is. Many of our core freedoms, especially freedom of speech, are being undermined by a political class that doesn’t trust us to live freely. But here’s the thing: such is the value still attached to the idea of freedom that now even attacks on freedom get dressed up as an expansion of freedom. Even the killing of freedom is disguised as freedom.

It seems fair to say that contemporary Australian creatives: artists, photographers, writers, publishers, film makers, polemicists, poets, and their audience, regard each other with suspicion. Photographs, web pages, television programs, newspaper articles, internet cartoons, broadcast pranks, speeches and even privately expressed opinions have all been discussed, dissected, boycotted, divested and otherwise sensationally prosecuted during the past few years.

There is a mood to compel the media to act for the public good, an expansion of media regulation to include public interest tests put to parliament (but defeated), a looming general election contested in part on issues of public interest and in part upon issues of free speech.  Where once free speech and public interest seemed inextricable, polemic is inexorably wedging them apart.

Newspapers’ circulation has fallen off a cliff.  Newspaper journalism is routinely outsourced overseas, our commercial TV networks are two-thirds owned by foreign banks, our commercial radio networks caught in spirals of cost-cutting and falling audiences. And Australians have turned their collective backs on government-approved and financed Australian films.

It is as if people can only bear to see and hear what is already known and agreeable.

The speed at which issues are churned online is overtaken only by the almost instantaneous coagulation of opinion around them. The occasional scholarly article lamenting, for example, media coverage of climate change issues, is liked and twittered and decontextualized and resignified at breakneck speed, contested and deconstructed and decried at length and likely to be of historical interest only long before any old fashioned op-ed or editorial response appears in the next edition of a daily tabloid or weekend broadsheet.

The sclerotic nature of internet discourse has been noted by many, an interesting counterpoint to what is  otherwise imagined as fluid lines of communication. To venture an opinion, for example on a blog, is to risk deletion. Anything you say can be held against you. Simultaneously, anything you say can be turned into something else - fixed! Somehow, it all seems to make sense, even if your original post had nothing to do with cats.

Durning the past few years Australians have campaigned for sackings, boycotts, internet filters, seizures, closures, divestments, damages, apologies, corrections, and even arrests over cultural artefacts, published words, pictures, videos, sounds, that for one reason or another became controversial. Alongside the large mass media outlets other, lesser, publishers have come under pressure: notably film festivals but also art dealers and even the management of assorted privately owned and operated public venues, like those hired for controversial Dutch politician Gert Wilders and British climate-change sceptic Lord Monckton.

But while there is a mood to allow the display of those publications, artworks, photographs, books, magazines, films, ideas, only if they are in the public interest, there is next to no clarity about what the public interest might be. Outrage has replaced clarity in so much of public discourse we can start to think about crossing out lucky and substituting angry in front of country.

At the very moment the freedom of unlimited communication beckons we rush to shackle ourselves in chains of mindless rage.

The previous post on this topic is here

On Photography - Eyes In Skies

There is a scene in Ridley Scott's 1982 movie Blade Runner which goes something like this:

Deckard: (pretending to be from the American Federation of Variety ArtistsConfidential Committee On Moral Abuses)  Oh yeah. I'd like to check your dressing room if I may.
Zhora: For what?
Deckard: For, uh, for holes.
Zhora:  Holes?
Deckard:  You'd be surprised what a guy would go through to get a glimpse of a beautiful body.
Zhora: No, I wouldn't.

Although it seems a little redundant to say so, the AustralianOffice of The Information Commissioner says there is a high level of community awareness of the use of surveillance cameras in our public places.

Former Assistant Privacy Commissioner Mark Hummerston says it is difficult to offer a single, consolidated figure of the number of surveillance cameras in Australia.  There are already 53 fixed surveillance cameras and 2 mobile camera-equipped vans operating in public places in central Melbourne alone.  Last year the Victorian State Government offered Melbourne local councils three million dollars to install more. At 30,000 dollars each, that’s an extra 100 to add to the unknown quantities already installed in public places.

The Australian Lawyers Alliance told ABC news last year “There’s a study out of the UK which shows, certainly in London, surveillance cameras have been responsible for solving one crime for every thousand cameras.” The Victorian Government recently ordered Victoria Police to audit the number and type of surveillance cameras in the State.

Despite Australian national privacy principles requiring that, where practicable, consumers must have the option to transact anonymously, every Melbourne taxi, automatic teller machine, train, tram, bus is camera equipped and many retailers photograph their customers. The Office of The Information Commissioner says concerns about surveillance cameras include misuse of stored photographs or videos, loss of anonymity, discomfort about being watched and the effectiveness of surveillance cameras achieving  their stated goal of crime prevention. Around eighty percent of people responding to surveys about surveillance cameras expressed no concerns about them at all. Five percent were 'very concerned.'

Last year the Melbourne Age newspaper bemoaned the spread of surveillance cameras as undermining “the sense of liberty that is part of the fabric of this city and this nation” (Saturday Age Editorial September 29 2012)  Brenna Krenus wrote a few days later that more cameras: “will not engender feelings of safety: they will heighten feelings of fear” (The Age October 2 2012).

Despite their ubiquity surveillance cameras do not unexpectedly present “an intentional intrusion (whether physical or otherwise) upon the situation of another (whether as to the person or his or her personal affairs) where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy; and the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities” (D Butler '(2005)'A Tort of Invasion of Privacy in Australia?’  Melbourne University Law Review 11)

What does present as intrusive, invasive and unexpected is a new generation of cheap, lightweight airborne cameras mounted on surveillance drones. There is a good example of their capabilities here on youtube

ABC journalist Mark Corcoran told the Sydney Morning Herald "The day is fast approaching where the small personal drone will be an obligatory part of the tool box for journalists, photographers and bloggers"

The Australian Privacy Foundation worried that Kate Middleton “and many other people besides can rest assured that their bare breasts are fair game, anywhere, any time,” after Australian Woman's Day published candid photographs of the pregnant Duchess in a bikini. It is legal to operate a remotely piloted drone in Australia below four hundred feet for non commercial purposes.  In Victoria it is illegal to knowingly use an ‘optical surveillance device’  to record a private activity without consent.

Anxieties about surveillance technologies are often expressed in the same vein as general concerns about photography: a potential loss of anonymity, discomfort about the photographic ‘gaze’, misuse, for example through publication, and the offensiveness of the images themselves. In one notorious case photographs of a dead child were obtained from a helicopter and published without the family’s knowledge.

The grieving parents wrote:

"We are not arguing the fact that the media have an important role to play, what we want is the media acting in a responsible, sensitive and ethical manner for grieving families such as ours and many others...At the time of Molly's loss of life we would have greatly appreciated the opportunity to share with the media in our own time and in our own words the story of her life”

As if to confirm the worst of general anxieties about photography, so-called ‘body scanners’,  cameras that see through clothes to the naked human body, are installed at eight Australian airports.

The Australian Government says The current generation body scanner is equipped with automatic threat recognition technology. This removes the need for screening officers to view detailed or ‘naked’ images and instead highlights areas of concern on a generic ‘stick’ figure. In addition, the body scanner is not able to store personal information about passengers or the screen display generated from individual scans.

The previous post on this topic is here

On Photography - In Trouble?

A woman meets relatives in a busy inner city shopping strip. There is banter, hugs, and before they say their goodbyes, a moment to take a couple of photographs. Later, she relaxes over a coffee in a nearby cafe, peeking at the photos on her camera’s liquid crystal display.

The woman, a friend, a respected artist/photographer, writer and academic, had her camera out again several days later when she was approached by the cafe's owner, who said he'd had complaints from four other patrons that she was 'photographing children'  Being a mother herself and a woman of standing, she was naturally upset and confused by what sounded to her as an accusation and was prompted to write this account:

...I was thoroughly shocked, insulted and offended yesterday when a Manager/Owner of a coffee shop in Camberwell said when he saw me with my camera, that if I brought out my camera again then they would not serve me. Apparently (according to him) he'd had four complaints from people saying that they didn't want their children photographed...

We often speak of transformative technology breathlessly, as if it were a desired, rather than lived, experience. Perversely, the lived experience of transformative technologies is often a negative one.

Anxieties about cameras are as old as the manufacture of film. The tools of photography are notionally extensions of natural, embodied phenomena - the camera a prosthetic eye and the photograph an augmentation of memory - that provided the basis for modern visual communication and began to globalize human experience long before the internet.

The incident itself bears the postmodern imprint of internet-speed culture. Something is remarked upon, there are likes, a critical number is reached, a moderator implements a ban - fixed!  In a spasm of autonomic reflex an artifact with no place in the social body is ejected, and the symbolic order of things restored.

The internet changed photography. Analyses of contemporary photographic practice give next to no account of the wirelessly interconnected lenses embedded in and peeking from everyday artifacts. Everywhere you look, they look back. From doors, walls, cars (both inside and outside), telephones, tablets, television screens and more, existing predominantly not to augment human bodies, but to make and store and categorize recordings of them.

Anxieties about surveillance are as ancient as writing itself. We live in times where old fears are magnified at every turn by experiences of photography as command and control. Those experiences are not novel in Western culture. Whole categories of people, for example those with disabilities, suffer forms of surveillance for the whole of life. The experiences are not novel but have become much more common, and have brought the invisible aspects of photography, the composing eye and controlling hand, to prominence in discussions about photography.

Where the photographer was previously almost invisible, a tabula-rasa upon which events imprinted themselves through an indifferent mechanism, now the question of what is not in a photograph is as salient as the question of what is. The composing eye is inexorably linked in culture on the one hand with expressions of power, and on the other with perversions of it. Chris Munroe writes, in Tracker, of Norman Tinsdale famous 1930s photographs of Aboriginal peoples:

Critics suggest the forlorn expressions staring back at the camera tell a tale of a sorrowful people treated like museum exhibits, firstly measured, weighed then forced to pose awkwardly for photos whilst clutching serial numbers. Many have compared the exploitative look of the images to those of police mug shots. A closer examination of the Tindale genealogical photographic collection reveals almost none of his subjects are smiling at the camera or seemingly engaging at all in the compulsory process either. They look resigned and defeated – an enduring reminder of the dark days of mission life and the Protection Board era.

There is a photograph by Bettina Rheims of style icon Kate Moss, bare-breasted, part of Rheims's Modern  Lovers series. In 1989, when the photograph was taken, Moss was 15. News columnist Andrew Bolt poses a problem with Rheims's photograph better than most:

Hear how Moss herself has described the pain that is the reason for laws to protect children from being forced to expose themselves for the sexual pleasure of others.

and

...This is art, we are told, not pornography. Perfectly fine to stare in a state gallery at a picture not too different from those for which a Melbourne stalker now faces jail. So ogle away, dear art lovers...

 (Herald-Sun, Melbourne, Thursday February 14 2013 pp15)

Despite previous controversies over the works of Bill Henson and Ella Dreyfus, the Art Gallery of NSW said it had ''no issue'' displaying Rheims's photograph of Moss. "We exhibit art, not pornography" the gallery told anyone who asked.

Controversies over photography often inhabit a kind of cultural underbelly and are often conducted at megaphone volume between contesting ivory towers. We have all seen politicians, for example, falling over each other on the way to denounce the latest photographic outrage. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, for instance, denouncing a photographic exhibition he hadn’t seen by an artist he’d previously never heard of discussed in a newspaper column he hadn’t read. While many claim outrage, few talk sense, and I think Chris Munroe and Andrew Bolt succinctly express cultural anxieties about who is  watching and why.

Here then are a couple of peaks, or ivory towers, landmarks in the cratered landscape contemporary photography finds itself labouring over. Cultural tensions over history, power, privacy, nudity, art versus porn - a battle some cast as ultimately between good and evil extremes.

Professor of Aesthetics Elaine Scarry provides a substantial contribution to the controversy, from an academic ivory tower, in On Beauty and Being Just

The political critique of beauty is composed of two parts. The first urges that beauty, by preoccupying our attention, distracts attention from wrong social arrangements.

and

The second argument holds that when we stare at something beautiful, make it an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the object.

(Elaine Scarry (2006) On Beauty And Being Just, Duckworth, London, pp58)


I'm interested in the first axis of argument because it directly states (but does not solve) a problem often raised. It seems to me that wrong social arrangements are at the heart of Andrew Bolt’s critique of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Beauty has the capacity to wound, not only others but also is itself at risk from the attentions it draws. This line of inquiry goes directly to the heart of anxieties over photographs of children. To paraphrase, innocence is at risk of destruction from the attentions of photography.

Around the same time the Art Gallery of NSW was organising school tours of its new photographic exhibition, Chi Magazine published photographs of a bikini-clad, pregnant, Duchess of Cambridge.

The controversy over those photographs of the Duchess of Cambridge turned upon ideas about public and private moments, privacy versus surveillance. In the photographs themselves the subjects are unaware and unposed, the (anonymous) photographer concealed from their view. The British Royals were reportedly “outraged”, inside their  white-walled palace.

"They are images of such unexceptional normality that there is only limited mention of them on the cover of the magazine," Chi's editor, Alfonso Signorini, told the BBC.

There was, however, many lengthy mentions of the photographs on the covers of other publications. I don't know how many covers above normal circulation a bikini clad aristocrat is good for, but you can bet that every editor who published those photographs worked it out beforehand. Style sells, celebrity sells, and I want to place by example in this geography of mind a market, not in any particular point,  but one which can displace the landscape anywhere, inconveniently, like a blemish upon an already cratered and pockmarked cultural underbelly.

Australian Woman's Day editor Fiona Connolly told News Limited she had no qualms about running the photographs of the Duchess, claiming they were taken by a fellow holiday maker on the Caribbean island of Mustique rather than a paparazzo. "It wasn’t a hard decision to run these photos," she said, and  "we are sensitive to photos that shouldn’t be published, for instance I haven’t laid eyes on the nude photos of Kate."

Nude photographs of the Duchess, also covertly obtained, were published in Grazia Magazine earlier this year. Designer Bella Freud, speaking to Vanity Fair last December about her time as a stylist with a large fashion retailer, describes walls and mood boards pinned with pages torn out of Grazia Magazine of daily sightings of (Kate) Moss. “Whole clothes lines have been made out of one look she put on one morning.” Grazia is typical of many such style, scandal and surveillance pictorial magazines sourcing photographs from long-lensed paparazzi and advertising from the fashion industry. Nudity sells, and what it sells is, paradoxically, apparel.

It seems to me that objections to these photographs are along the lines suggested in Elaine Scarry's second axis of argument, that when we stare at the beautiful Duchess, make her an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the Duchess. The immediately visible destruction is of her privacy, but that is only the beginning. Publication of private moments pose a danger to her moral integrity as well, and none more serious than to the childlike Kate Moss.

Fashion ivory towers Vogue Magazine and Cosmopolitan have traded blows over what Connolly described as sensitivity to photographs of Moss that shouldn't be published.

Corinne Day’s photographs, styled by Cathy Kasterine, of Moss for British Vogue “showing how we all wear our underwear when we’re hanging around the bedroom” as Kasterine put it, were described by competitor Cosmopolitan’s outraged editor as “Hideous and tragic. I believe they can only appeal to the pedophile market. If I had a daughter who looked like that, I would take her to see a doctor”. Moss herself shoots back “Ridiculous. I must have been 19. I’m standing in my underwear. Really controversial.” But Moss has described herself as depressed, and pressured to bear her breasts for the cameras as a sixteen year old in the famous Calvin Klein heroin chic advertisements. New York is a beating heart of uber capitalism, and Moss’s work experience there frames one of the best arguments I know for unionism and the formation of industry associations dedicated to protecting members from moral exploitation.

Photography polarizes opinion at every turn. Worse, dialogue about moral issues are from a distance between the vested interests in ivory towers that sense some worth in their being conducted at megaphone strength. Photography is in trouble. Part of the problem is discourse. At the very moment the camera became ubiquitous, leaders of public opinion, who might be expected to step up and fulfil their self-proclaimed roles as authorities of specification and delineation, are divided and defensive behind the walls of their ivory towers.

Photography is in trouble. At any moment a photographer’s work might be seized, even photographs that previously hung with pride in public spaces, as happened to Bill Henson’s works in recent times. Or a child might be declared a sex offender for life, for posting a naked picture of someone somewhere from their phone, or downloading one to it in an email.

At any moment a woman with a camera in her handbag might become the object of scurrilous whispers and unwelcome attentions. Since one way or another we all carry cameras with us now, the problem can only get worse.

Beginning with this and continuing in the next few few posts on the topic, I'm going to attempt to sketch what I see as marking the boundaries of the problem, and the pathways to them, a geography of mind pursuing the tangled landscape of Civilization itself.  And I'm hoping against hope that it does not follow a trajectory of the photograph from treasured memory to the scene of a crime.

Angry Old White Men

I read somewhere that I am an angry old white male. That's because I subscribe to The Australian. I've been reading The Australian since the 1970's, so it seems that I've been old and angry all my life. I read somewhere else that I'm an inner city Latte drinking pinko green watermelon because I read Green Left Weekly. Must have read that in The Australian newspaper. 

Elsewhere I am congratulated for my commitment to independent media by subscribing to New Matilda, excoriated as a climate change denier because I read the Herald-Sun,  exposed as a climate change alarmist because I raised a mild criticism about Andrew Bolt's  TV talk show,  reviled as anti Catholic because I support a Royal Commission on Child Abuse, a coconut because I read Tracker, a communist because I support community owned and operated Melbourne Community TV broadcaster Channel 31, a liberal pansy because I watch ABC TV,  a conservative hard liner because I write in support of broadcaster Alan Jones right to speak freely.

What can be labelled can be hated. But doesn't hating something only make it stronger?

This was on my mind as I read the latest spat between The Australian and the ABC. Andrew McIntyre, in an article for The Australian  titled  For Normal Viewing Lean Left, writes:

...so many educated, generally mildly apolitical, well thinking middle class people with a regular diet of the ABC and Fairfax, simply are not aware that, for instance, the world has stopped warming for the past 16 years, that hurricanes and extreme weather events have declined and are not related to global warming, that Doha was a dismal failure, that the NBN has never had a cost benefit analysis, that Green jobs cost money ... and jobs, that growing the economic pie is not the same as redistributing tax revenue...

I'm not going to join in and contribute my own content analysis, a formal, often formulaic and sometimes fatuous and definitely old fashioned, quaint even, methodology for analysing mass media texts I have roundly criticised on these pages before. I have been especially critical of the so-called revelations of  bias in The Australian newspaper by media academics. 

McIntyre is basically calling for greater scrutiny and regulation of the ABC to eliminate bias. If we are not careful Australians are going to, quite scientifically and forensically and with the best of intentions, regulate free speech out of existence. Surely, if the market of ideas is truly robust and, as McIntyre writes:

...in the US the population would, without the omnipresent media bias, score fully 20 percentage points further to the Right. If correct, this is very troubling...

then why doesn't the market  itself correct  bias? As it is, the ABC audience is as big as it ever has been. 

It just might be that Australia is a nation of individuals thinking for themselves and making up their own minds, free from the chafing yolk of censorship and state sponsored interference in the production and consumption of mass media objects. Watching, reading, and listening are all passive acts which precede the active and onerous business of forming an opinion.  Heaven help us if  we ever only allow those things that are agreeable to us, only read what accords with our prejudices, or only speak what we believe  is agreeable to others.

Happy Christmas to everyone, hope all your dreams come true. Whichever way you lean.

JEWS, BLACKS, WOMEN, THE POOR AND DISABLED, IN 'THE CRUCIBLE'

Julie Clarke (Copyright 2012)

Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible and the 1996 film of the same name refers to a witch hunt carried out in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. It was written several years after one with similar themes by the German-Jewish émigré to America, Lion Feuchtwanger entitled Wahn oder Der Teufel in Boston (Delusion, or The Devil in Boston) 1948. Feuchtwanger was, like Miller accused of being a communist sympathizer during the McCarthy era and although both plays underscore xenophobia and mass hysteria and speak to periods of extreme hysteria throughout history in which individuals considered different, disloyal or subversive were accused of evil doing without substantive evidence; I would argue that Miller’s screenplay of The Crucible (Nicholas Hytner, 1996) is more likely emblematic of a fear of the other invariably inscribed on the female body.

The Crucible (Nicholas Hytner, 1996) is significant to contemporary society in that there has been an increased vigilance to identify, locate and investigate Islamic fundamentalist terrorists who pose a threat to human life.[1] Patterns of cultural valuing and devaluing have emerged in which individuals are constituted as other, inferior, dangerous and in need of surveillance.

 http://www.ramshacklechic.com/2010/05/france-moves-toward-partial-burqa-ban-cnn-com/

Those outside Christendom are perceived as alien to western cultural ideals and more often than not during this intense period of Islamaphobia it is Muslim women who are targeted because of their orthodox dress and behavior. Those who wear the black Burqa, a mark of religious and ideological belief, suggests to some that they concealing a dangerous and potential evil not unlike the one unleashed by the cloaked girls in the Salem forest, who were also perceived as being masked by silence.

Abigail in The Crucible

There is certain strangeness in The Crucible for it represents imagination in the minds of the girls who accused many adults (mainly women) in Salem of being witches. A similar mindset is exhibited by Miller who used his imagination to distort much of the historical truth. Indeed, he altered the girl’s ages (from historical facts) so that in the film their sexual desire is a potent force that is a catalyst for much of the hysteria. This may explain why Miller who was aware after reading Charles W. Upham’s rather benign account of a small group of young girls (possibly under the age of twelve years) who met at Mr. Parris's house ‘for the purpose of practising palmistry, and other arts of fortune-telling, and of becoming experts in the wonders of necromancy, magic, and spiritualism’ (Upham, 1867); included in the screen drama, a more potent scene in which girls dance with Tituba around a crucible and create love spells. We may also ask why in the film he introduces George Jacobs Senior as a new (albeit historical) character in the film and how his character relates to the strangeness of the girls involved in an exotic ritual.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TheWitch

Whilst undertaking research on the Salem witch trials, Miller saw a lithograph of bearded men of the court, shrinking back in horror as a woman on trial summoned supernatural energy[2].

A shaft of sepulchral light shoots down from a window high up in a vaulted room, falling upon the head of a judge whose face is blanched white, his long white beard hanging to his waist, arms raised in defensive horror as beneath him the covey of afflicted girls screams and claws at invisible tormentors. Dark and almost indistinguishable figures huddle on the periphery of the picture, but a few men can be made out, bearded like the judge, and shrinking back in pious outrage. (Burns, 2011)

This reminded him of an event at a synagogue in his childhood when he saw old men dancing and singing crazily.[3] Miller explains: ‘I knew instantly what the connection was: the moral intensity of the Jews and the clan's defensiveness against pollution from outside the ranks…I understood Salem in that flash; it was suddenly my own inheritance’ (1996a). We can assume from this statement that Miller understood the puritans of Salem, who wished to protect their way of life from evil that would pollute and contaminate them. I would argue that there is a definite link between Miller’s memory of fifteen Jewish men dancing in a circle with shawls over their head, his discomfort witnessing something strangely forbidden, and the ecstasy expressed by the girls in the forest who also participate in and witness a clandestine ceremony in which blood, sexuality and race are revealed as corrupting elements. In both instances, an irrational fear of the unknown and unseen is evoked. Indeed Miller conceded that there was a ‘living connection between’ himself and Salem and that the Un-American Activities Committee hearings ‘in Washington were profoundly and even avowedly ritualistic’.[4] I admire what I would call, the feminization of Miller’s experience and memory of these men, who appear hysterical, a state of being stereotypically ascribed to females.

Paradoxically, in the screen play Miller includes not a pious gentlemen defending contamination from outside (as in the lithograph), but a reversal of sorts, for he includes in the film version, George Jacobs Senior (William Preston), an arthritic, who was most likely of Jewish descent[5] and one of three men tried and hanged for wizardry in the actual Salem witch trials.[6] Miller also alters this account, for in a painting entitled The Trial of George Jacobs, by T. H. Matteson (1692), Jacobs is depicted as able-bodied, but his gesture of outstretched arms does mirror the body of the witch in the lithograph. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Matteson_Trial_of_George_Jacobs.jpg

Accused of being part of the contagion of evil that had supposedly infiltrated puritanical Salem, Jacobs is aligned with other old or poor woman indicted with witchcraft and his body marked as different by his dependence upon two walking sticks is echoed in the contorted bodies of the young girls (who display supposedly interior evil on the exterior of their bodies). However, it is Abigail Williams (Winona Ryder) who is set up, not only as femme fatale (she seduces John Proctor and then points her finger accusingly at his wife as witch) but as the penultimate witch of Salem and it is through her that pollution becomes evident.

Barbara Creed argues that women are, by virtue of their gender, monstrous and throughout western history has been aligned with outsiders, such as Jews, blacks, the poor and the disabled and are therefore posited as different and inferior[7]. The Crucible follows a long line of films that equate voodoo with Satanism and black skinned people with the black arts, however, the girls who accuse others of witchcraft display a body of evidence used to substantiate evil.[8] We must remember that within the religious climate of Salem the devil was ubiquitous and was believed to be able to tempt women into transgressing. Female compaction with the devil supposedly gave them supernatural powers such as flying and shape shifting and their secrecy about such concord was substantiated by their silence or exterior markers on their body.

The Crucible

The Crucible (Nicholas Hytner, 1996) is an account, albeit inaccurate, of the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. The film begins with a potent scene in a forest in which local girls from Salem village together with Tituba (Charlayne Woodard), a black slave, most likely from Barbados, engage in a clandestine ceremony around a boiling cauldron.[9] Blood, sexuality and race are revealed as corrupting elements and what follows is hysteria borne out of an exacerbated fear of the unknown and unseen, ignited by visible signs on the girl’s bodies.[10] Undeniably the bodies of the girls become a screen on which passion and hysteria is mapped. In ancient times menstrual blood incited fear, for if women could produce life they were considered to be able to cause it to wither. The blood also indicates the gruesome death of Abigail’s parents in which their blood was spilled. ‘I saw Indians smash my dear parents' heads on the pillow next to mine and I have seen some reddish work done at night’, Abigail says to the village girls (Miller, 1996:19)  In all cases blood and silence becomes a strange marker associated with the female body; and the correlation of Abigail with the almost supernatural powers of blood establishes her as evil and other.

The Reverend Parris (Bruce Davison) who witnesses this highly sexualized event in the forest, involving love spells, chanting, nakedness and voodoo is shocked to discover that his niece Abigail (Winona Rider), his daughter Betty (Rachael Bella) and his black slave Tituba are participants. The next morning Betty Parris and Ruth Putnum (Ashley Peldam) are found unconscious and since Doctor Griggs (Peter Maloney) cannot find an earthly reason for their condition, Ann Putnam (Frances Conroy) assumes their narcolepsy is the work of vengeful spirits, possibly evoked by Sarah Good (Sheila Pinkham) and Goody Osborne (Ruth Maleczech). Much speculation has occurred as to why the young girls appeared paralytic after their experience in the forest, since Miller’s account of the Salem witch trials was considered to be an accurate account,  however, I would argue that the inclusion of a rooster and blood ritual in the opening scene of the film, evokes voodoo[11] and is utilized to explain the negative effects on the afflicted girls - one whose eyes are closed and does not move, the other whose eyes are open, but hears naught, sees naught, and cannot eat.[12] The girls have become aligned with evil through their silence and in Ruth’s case her stillness is attributed by her mother to her becoming more secretive. The attribution of furtiveness is important here because human nature has shown that when we identify a person’s behavior as unusual we immediately become fearful or suspicious of them.

News of the girls’ strange affliction travels quickly with some in the village believing that Parris’s daughter has supernatural powers and can fly.[13]  Afraid that his reputation will be tarnished, Parris calls a meeting to announce that he has invited the Reverend John Hale, an expert in the demonic arts, to visit Salem to establish whether or not the devil is present.

After examining the girls and consulting his books in which ‘the Devil stands stripped of all his brute disguises’ [14] Hale and Parris coerce Tituba into confessing her compaction with the Devil. Tituba’s confession whilst being brutally whipped by her master is no different to contemporary accounts of confessions extracted by torture from detainees suspected of being potential terrorists, who would offer an admission of guilt rather than endure further pain and anguish. The assumption in contemporary accounts as well as during the Salem witch trials is that secretiveness suggests guilt and those, such as John Proctor (Daniel Day-Lewis), Rebecca Nurse (Elizabeth Lawrence) and Martha Corey (Mary Pat Gleason) who did not confess to witchcraft or accuse others of same were eventually lead to the gallows.

Tituba introduces voodoo ritual to the girls and Kelli V. Randall explains that racial identity is the sole criteria for identifying her as a witch for she is the first to be accused and the first to accuse others of witchcraft. (Randall, 2008)  Following a medieval tradition of perceiving the devil as black-skinned, many Euro-colonists of the time regarded Indian religion and culture as satanic, and since Salem was often under attack by these ‘devils’ skin color became a signifier of evil.[15]

Indeed the girls of Salem often said they saw a ‘black man’ standing next to those they accused, substantiating that the entity was not only not human but evil.[16] (McDermott, 1999:1) Since slaves generally had dark skin, they were considered less than human and consequently inferior to white people. The devil as non-human other is brought forth here through the notion of slavery, since slaves did not have human status. Since Abigail refused to be Elizabeth Proctor’s (Joan Allan) slave and Mary Warren (Karron Graves) said she would no longer cower under threat of John Proctor’s whip they share Tituba’s non human status. Both girls use the hysteria in Salem to inflict retribution upon the Proctors for past deeds and they accused others of witchcraft simply because they were easy targets and would be more readily accepted as purveyors of evil. Some of those accused, such as Sarah Good, George Jacobs (William Preston) and Rebecca Nurse already bore marks of difference and aging on their body and were loathed by members of the Salem community so it was easy to graft this further ‘otherness’ of evil upon them. We are reminded here to be rational, rather than emotional when confronted with difference; a method adopted by the Reverend Hale who eventually relied upon empirical knowledge, rather than speculation to uncover that jealousy and covetousness were the prime motivators behind the witchcraft accusations. Abigail was certainly jealous of Elizabeth for she desired her husband John Proctor and could not abide the fact that he would rather cut off his hand than reach for her again.

Abigail who sees the potency and power of Tituba’s admission also demonizes local women and fearful that the truth will out, threatens the girls with a ‘pointy reckoning’ if they reveal what really happened in the forest. They began to act in strange ways, attesting to the fact that they had been ‘witched’ by certain undesirable members of Salem society, whom they name. Several of the other girls follow suit and before long many innocent residents of Salem are accused of witchcraft.  John Proctor, who has had a clandestine relationship with Abigail, suspects that she has something to do with the hysteria. There is an assumption that women have a secret life outside the domain of men or the Church. Massachusetts woman Anne Hutchinson, who spoke out against religious orthodoxy and encouraged an individualistic, rather than theocratic view was persecuted and banished in 1637 ‘as being not fit for our society’ by Governor John Winthrop, because Winthrop thought her testimony that God had ‘revealed himself’ to her was delusional. Paradoxically, the young girls who cried ‘witch’ and who spoke of invisible evil forces, had little trouble in convincing men of the Church half a century later of the power of the unseen, by acting out that evil upon the surface of their body. Of course, accusing others of witchcraft empowered the girls at a time in which Salem women had little political or judicial propriety, however, this only added to long held views about complicity between the feminine gender and evil. Giles Corey (Peter Vaughan) unwittingly implicates his wife Martha in witchcraft by assuming that since she was secretive about her reading habits she must have been reading something other than the Bible. There is a fear here that the knowledge and power that women gained from reading books is different by degree to those of man and God and was certainly threatening to the men of Salem village.[17]Indeed the lust of ‘Christian women and their covenanted men’ spoken about by Abigail to John Proctor, may suggest that the strange book that Martha reads is one that offers an outlet for her passion or opportunities for challenging established norms.

Corey’s suspicions about his wife are fueled by Walcott who charges Martha of bewitching his pigs with her books and the power of the book, its hidden knowledge and influence is raised when Mary Warren accuses John Proctor of coercing her into signing her name in the devil’s book, Abigail and Sarah Good’s confession to writing in it and Sarah’s accusation that Goody Osborne wrote her name in it with her own blood. Women already had a secret life linked with blood through their shared experience of menstruation and childbirth, and in ancient times menstrual blood incited fear, for if women could produce life they could also cause it to wither. Ann Putnam, jealous of the fecundity of other women, believed that the death of seven of her own children was due to witchcraft. Blood is a powerful signifier of initiation into womanhood and a primal element, said to be used by witches to perform ritual magic, and, it is through the vehicle of blood and race that the secret life of women was evoked, for it was Titiba who swirled a live rooster around her head in the forest as she sang a song from Barbados and Abigail who thrashed the rooster to death on the cauldron catching its blood in her hand and raising it to her lips.  In Haitian voodoo, blood is smeared on the mouth as a reminder to participants to remain circumspect and the blood that sealed Abigail’s orifice was analogous to Betty’s closed eyes, blind to the external world and alluding to one unseen.

The correlation of Abigail with the supernatural powers of blood establishes her as evil. She drank a blood potion so that Elizabeth Proctor might die and after seeing Mary Warren (Karron Graves) place a needle in a poppet she was sewing during the trial of George Jacobs (a portent that Mary later gave to Elizabeth), Abigail, versed in the doll’s power as a vehicle for casting spells, later collapses in the tavern with a needle stuck two inches into her belly, which she maintains was pushed in by Elizabeth Proctor’s (Joan Allen) familiar spirit.

This association between witchcraft and difference became evident when Sarah Osborne and George Jacobs Senior are called to court to face Thomas Danford (Paul Scofield), Deputy Governor of the province, Judge Samuel Sewell (George Gaynes) and Ruth Putnam (Ashley Peldon) who accused Jacobs of witchcraft. His supposed evil may be prefaced not only on the convincing nature of Ruth’s accusation but by virtue of the fact that his contorted, arthritic body may have indicated to those present, evidence of a twisted mind capable of conjuring a spirit to press against Ruth’s young body.[18]  His body, so marked is echoed in the contorted, fitful and hysterical bodies of the young girls who recount their experiences and mirror his supposed evil. There is often an assumption that those who look or behave differently not only challenge our cultural norms but may be concealing a desire to break down our ideologies.

Ultimately the evils that existed in Salem were less to do with a belief system that fueled fear of an unseen power (historically linked to women) that could threaten piety and life, and more to do with envy of another’s position, power or influence and since some of the girls were subject to domination and abuse they took the opportunity to seek revenge in order to better their situation and challenge the laws of men and the church. More than this, The Crucible reveals that white/black, good/evil; able bodied/disabled, superior/inferior, west/east dichotomies continue to prevail and color our perceptions of others.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Burns Margo,  Arthur Miller's The Crucible: Fact & Fiction (or Picky, Picky, Picky... 
Revised: 9/27/11. 

Carlson, Laurie Winn (1999).  A Fever in Salem: A New Interpretation of the New England Witch Trials. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher.

Christiane Desafy-Grignard (2004), ‘Jewishness and Judaism revisited in two Short Stories by Arthur Miller: ‘Monte Sant' Angelo’ and ‘I Don't Need You Anymore’, Journal of the Short Story in English [Online], 43 | Autumn 2004, Online since 05 août 2008, Connection on 08 mars 2012. URL : http://jsse.revues.org/index413.html (Accessed March 2012).

McDermott, Gerald R. (1999) ‘Jonathan Edwards and American Indians: The Devil Sucks Their Blood’, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 72, No. 4, Dec.

Miller, Arthur (1983). The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts, USA: Penguin.

Miller, A (1996a) Arthur Miller, Life and Letters, “WHY I WROTE "THE CRUCIBLE",” The New Yorker, October 21, 1996, p.158

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1996/10/21/1996_10_21_158_TNY_CARDS_000373902#ixzz1mzTcJWg0

Miller, Arthur (1996b). The Crucible: A screenplay by Arthur Miller, Great Britain: Metheun Films.

Randall, Kelli V. (2008).  ‘Corrupted by Skin Color: Racist and Misogynist Perceptions of Hoodoo in Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem’, Women Writers: A Zine.

See: http://www.womenwriters.net/aug08/Maryse_Conde.htm

Roper, Lyndal (1991). ‘Magic and the theology of the body: Exorcism in sixteenth-century Augsburg’, In: (ed) Charles Zika, No gods except me: Orthodoxy and Religious Practice in Europe 1200-1600, History Department, The University of Melbourne.

Upham, Charles W. (1867) Salem Witchcraft: With an Account of Salem Village and A History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects, New York, Frederick Ungar Publishing Company. Vol 2, p3.

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[1] Indeed many Muslims are concerned that FBI guidelines could target innocent people.

[2] The lithograph of the Salem witch trials was possibly made by Joseph E. Baker (1892). The image may be found at the following link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_depictions_of_the_Salem_witch_trials

[3] Desafy-Grignard,  Christiane (2004)

[4] Miller, Timebends A Life, 1987

[5] A bearded elder with white hair, he mirrors a representation of him in an oil painting entitled The Trial of George Jacobs (T. H. Matteson, 1855).August 5, 1692 by T. H. Matteson, 1855.  http://etext.virginia.edu/salem/witchcraft/texts/. The following site states that George Jacobs was Jewish. http://www.wyman.org/Genealogy/getperson.php?personID=I28171&tree=Wyman

[6] George Jacobs was not a character in Miller’s original play.

[7] Creed, Barbara. (1993). The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, London and New York, Routledge, p3.

[8] Angel Heart (Allan Parker, 1987) is one such example and includes a voodoo ritual scene in which Epiphany cuts the throat of a chicken and smears its blood on her body, creating not only fear of the other, female black sexuality but also associates voodoo with the devil.

[9] This scene may have been inspired by William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth (1603-1607) in which three witches prepare a magic potion in a cauldron. The cauldron is a cliché image popularized in children’s books and associated with magic.

[10] Miller’s childhood memory of witnessing fifteen Jewish men dancing in a circle and singing ecstatically in a synagogue and his discomfort witnessing something strangely forbidden may have influenced his decision to include this scene in the film, which was not in his original play.

[11] It should be noted that animal sacrifice has been practiced in many religions.

[12] Encephalitis lethargica was offered as an explanation (Carlson, 1999) and in Lion Feuchtwanger’s play Parris’s daughter is inflicted with paroxysms. However, voodoo death (psychosomatic death caused by a strong emotional response) maybe referenced.

[13] Abigail pretends to see Mary Warren’s spirit manifest in the form of a yellow bird on the ceiling rafters in the court room, attesting to the notion of her supernatural power.

[14] The books may be the Malleus Maleficarum (1486) a medieval treatise on witches or the Compendium Maleficarum: A Handbook on Witchcraft from the 1600 

[15] This thinking may also have been adopted for in biblical accounts it was Judas Iscariot, a dark-skinned Jewish man who betrayed Christ. 

[16] At the trial Ruth informs Judge Danford (Paul Scofield) that a black man was whispering in Jacob’s ear.

[17] A fear that females may become powerful if educated is evident in a recent case in which a fourteen year old Pakistani female activist Malala Yousufzai, who promotes girl’s education, was shot in the head by a member of the Taliban for vocally opposing the militant group’s behavior.

[18] George Jacobs was one of three men tried and hanged for wizardry in the actual Salem witch trials.