Artful Censorship Of ’70s Erotica
- Words
- Rosie Flanagan
Talk of censorship brings to mind black bars and pixels — but in the most recently published work of French photographer Tiane Doan na Champassak, Censored, it takes a much more artful form.
In a selection of over 4000 images, Tiane’s Censored documents government enforced censorship in Thailand during the 1960s and ’70s. Hand-drawn animals, stars, and planets cover nipples, as an eagle spreads its wings protectively across a woman’s pubis. There were teams of people employed to censor these images after the magazines had been printed — inadvertently turning censorship into an artform of its own. Tiane first stumbled upon a hand-censored erotic Thai magazine over a decade ago, and in his travels between France and Southeast Asia has amassed an immense collection. Censored was born from this collection and his continuing interest in concepts of sexuality and censorship.
All images © Tiane Doan na Champassak, Censored
