Banned in Iran: Graphic Depictions of the Shocking Truth!

The blog j|trun has a great new post up visually chronicling censorship in Iran, focusing on editing of mainstream Western magazines like the Economist and National Geographic. Here for instance is a National Geographic cover story on "love" as it was delivered in Iran:

The background on how the materials was acquired has a cute twist:

It was not until the second time I saw one of the black slabs of ink that I realized that the magazines were indeed censored! This sparked my interest, and I went back several times in the following days, and basically cleared out the store of foreign magazines. (It turned out that the shop owner had some uncensored issues of fashion magazines under the counter - which he very subtly offered me to purchase - and when I said that I’d rather buy the censored ones his jaw fell to the floor.)

Here are some of the black slabs:

And here are is an example of the black magic-marker art applied to sanitize advertisements:

The author has some interesting observations about this censorship:

One of the more interesting things with all this, I think, is how words are left uncensored, but images are not. The only word that was explicitly censored was “Playboy”, in spite of the articles being full of things that must be considered western propaganda.

From a westerner’s point-of-view, the censorship can be described in terms of political and/or sexual. The political censorship is the cartoons of the religious and worldly leaders, and the sexual being primarily the female body and some of its attributes. It’s important, however, to remember that women are not censored to the standard that is expected in the real world: in the Iranian society the hair is supposed to be veiled from a strangers gaze – in these images its left untouched and visible.

Comments

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Wow the censor allowed a woman's hair to be seen in a magazine?! Maybe next we will see censors allowing Nasrin Alavi's porno to be seen in Iran!

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NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC?
What the hell would the censor in National Geographic?!

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