REVISED EDITION
This project, created while I lived and worked in Singapore in 2005-06, documents Singaporean libraries' systematic censorship of photography books. Many photo history books have been purged (with scissors) of all traces of nudity, sexuality, of "objectionable" politics.
These images are thus documentation of absence: torn pages, missing pages, missing images, and captions dissociated from the images they refer to. They form a poignant record of the effects of censorship elsewhere in the world, while also functioning as a cautionary tale for America today, which remains curiously complacent despite the curtailing of civil liberties and free speech as part of the war on terror.
The images from Revised Edition also call into question the extent to which photographic documentation can claim to offer us meaningful knowledge: after all, these images can only bear witness to the fact of absence, and cannot ever replace what the censors have forcibly removed.
