The book that compiles images censored by Instagram

Playground Traduccion

10 Marzo 2017 16:27

Photos of women's bodies, sexual relations and nude selfies that violate Instagram's Community Guidelines.

If you've ever wondered what happens to all those photos that get deleted from Instagram for violating the app's guidelines, you may be pleased to hear that they've found themselves a happy home in a new book called Pics or It Didn't Happen: Images Banned from Instagram.

Artists Arvida Byström and Molly Soda put out an open call asking Instagrammers to submit their censored pics, giving new life to photos that had been considered inappropriate for the platform.

Unsurprisingly, many of these photos feature the female body, often partly or wholly nude. As Soda said to Dazed, 'the female body is constantly policed – why would Instagram be any different?'

This led the authors to provide a series of images of women's bodies, sexual relations and nude selfies which explore how social media guidelines reflect social customs in regards to attitudes to women's bodies and female nudity.

'As women, we grow up learning to be critical of our own bodies, as well as other women's bodies – there is a great sense of shame embedded into all of it. There is a great fear that surrounds the female body – a nude photograph immediately becomes pornographic even if that is not the intent,' said Soda to Dazed.

Instagram's Community Guidelines state they will remove anything 'violent, nude, partially nude, discriminatory, unlawful, infringing, hateful, pornographic, or sexually suggestive.'

While some of the photos seem to be a breach of Instagram's rules, others, such as a woman in a hijab listening to her mobile phone, or poet Rupi Kaur in a blood-stained bed, don't seem to enter into conflict with the Guidelines at all, making us question what criteria the platform really bases its censorship on.

[Via Dazed]

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