E-Mail This Article to a Friend Contextual evidence The Gardner Museum’s ‘New Censorship’ BY JON GARELICK

It stands to reason that a panel discussion about photography titled "The New Censorship: Discretion or Taboo?" would encompass just about every taboo regarding the photographic image: nudity and sexuality, violence, politics and images as propaganda, representations of war and death, cropping, even the nature of truth itself. For the first of two scheduled discussions of the topic (the second will take place next Thursday, November 4), the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum lined up Aperture editor-in-chief Melissa Harris, artist/architect/filmmaker Alfedo Jarr, and New York Times Magazine photo editor Kathy Ryan.

The Chilean-born Jarr (he’s lived in New York City for 22 years) re-created one of his discomforting performance pieces, this one drawing on his extensive research in Rwanda from 1994 to 2000. As Jarr recited a chronology of events from 1994, with accompanying death counts, Newsweek covers from the corresponding weeks were displayed on a video screen: a bear with the headline "How To Survive a Scary Market," Kurt Cobain’s suicide, the death of Richard Nixon, a couple of O.J. Simpson covers ("Trail of Blood"), and finally, in August 1994, after a million deaths in Rwanda, the one with the headline "Hell on Earth." The screen went black; as we sat in darkness, Jarr played a song of mourning by the African musician Papa Wemba. Jarr’s method was blunt, but it supported his contention that "the press is very self-centered in our world, and I sometimes feel that it’s a world of fiction." Few novelists would likely disagree.

The presentations by Ryan and Harris were more straightforward. Ryan showed the Times Magazine’s photo coverage of Bush and Kerry campaigning, with Simon Norfolk’s birdseye views taking in not only the site of a specific stump speech but also the crowd size and the surrounding countryside, whether farmland or a beach in Florida. Photos of refugee camps — published just prior to the invasion of Iraq — revealed various stages of development: a just-begun camp in Chad; a 10-year-old camp in Chechnya; a 20-year-old camp on the Pakistan/Afghan border.

Harris said that the shot of the rubble of the Palestinian settlement in Jenin was the most controversial shot she’d ever published, more so than any sexual photo. Then there was Sally Mann’s 1989 shot Virginia at 4, a full-frontal nude shot of her daughter. After presenting the photo as published in Aperture, Harris showed an article about the photo in the Wall Street Journal in which Virginia’s eyes and genitals were covered by black. The audience laughed, but the juxtaposition was disturbing: here was an art photograph turned by an act of censorship into smut.

Harris and Ryan presented example after example of how context — whether through cropping, design, or accompanying text — can clarify or distort meaning. Jarr, however, had the last word regarding his frankly didactic attempts to move an audience’s conscience. "These are all exercises," he said of his pieces, "and they all fail. I’m trying to represent experiences that are impossible to represent. . . . A six-year-old girl who’s seen her parents killed with machetes in front of her eyes. How do you represent that?"

On November 4 at 6:30 p.m., the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum will present "The New Censorship: Going Global," with Anne Nivat, journalist and author of Chienne de Guerre (which is about the war in Chechnya), Associated Press international editor Deborah Seward, and moderator Robin Young of WBUR-FM. The Gardner is at 280 the Fenway in Boston, and tickets are $7, free for students; call (866)-468-7619, or (617) 278-5187 for student tickets.