My motivations for producing this exhibition and series of video documentaries has come about as a result of the consistent upsurge of censorship and the steady erosion of civil liberties in Britain over the past decade. Censorship operates through the promotion of ignorance. Hence the only way to combat this is by publicising and making people aware of existing forms of censorious behaviour and current attempts to make act of restriction law.
Over the Thatcher years, nurtured by eleven years of Conservatism, we have seen the growth of many examples of such legislation in Clause 28; the 'Media Ban' on Sinn Fein representatives; Spycatcher; Death on the Rock; the uproar over 'The Satanic Verses' and Salman Rushdie's subsequent death threats. The list is endless....
My fears that censorship takes strength and momentum from the restrictive climate and the erosion of the rights of the individual, has been proven correct. In the past two years since producing this exhibition, censorship has stepped up its pace and is now tearing its way through America, land of the free, affecting rock and rap music, and the arts in numerous cases of accused obscenity and blasphemy.
I thought that maybe my work in this exhibition could well be outdated and irrelevant, but unfortunately, it seems to be more relevant now than ever.
The photographs in the show are the result of interviews with a cross-section of individuals putting across their own opinions and experiences with differing aspects of censorship. These range from interviews with public figures such as Mary Whitehouse; Guy Phelps from The British Board of Film Classification; the award winning gay author Geoff Ryman; to schoolteachers and lecturers; reverends and gay social workers.
The aim of the exhibition and the documentaries is to give the viewer a taste of what is going on, and without going into too many facts and figures, keeping it as a simple cross-section of the broad spectrum that is censorship.
Press release as written Autumn 1991
Work exhibited at Projects UK 4th October 21 December 1991
New Lights Selected Exhibitions
Stage Pass Nov / Dec 1991