Widely referred to as ‘The Situation Room Photograph’, the image of Barack Obama and his most trusted advisors as they watch the events unfold in Pakistan is rapidly becoming the most viewed photograph on Flickr. The photograph is based on a simple, yet a very powerful dynamic characterized by an exchange of gazes: the viewer…
Yurie Nagashima, Kazoku, 1993 In a previous blog post, I wrote about the photographer Yurie Nagashima whose photographs of herself and her family in the nude instigated a dramatic shift in Japanese visual culture. After exhibiting her phenomenally successful Kazoku series in 1993, Nagashima continued to interrogate photographic subjects related to gender, sexuality, representation and…
The kiss is a risqué subject in the cinematic cultures of India. While nudity, sex and sexual violence might pass as acceptable, it is the kiss, or the ‘smooch’ in Indian English, that is most likely to trigger government agencies to censor films. Particularly Bollywood filmmakers are fully aware of the scandalous implications of kissing…