The Photo Book – Objects of Desire This essay examines the meaning behind visual culture in a series of photographic images that have been transformed through censorship in Egypt. The censored book images were collected in Cairo’s bookstores between 2012 and 2014, and the original images had been doctored to conceal the human body1. This involves canons of Western photographic history. The process of Egyptian censorship entails hand-painting each photographic image, in each book edition to obscure the full erotic effect of the human body. This essay frames how these doctored photographic images impose particular meanings on the photographs and the potential merits of iconoclastic intervention. The Parallax Error examines the political and aesthetic status of the object in the transformation of the original photograph, from an object of desire to an object situated more within certain artistic traditions of montage. This considers the surface tension created between the censorship act and its impact on the original. These hybrid images provide a political basis to rethink visual culture encounters in the interconnected and increasingly globalised contemporary image world. After passing through the Egyptian state run organization Al Riqqaba Ala El Musanafat El Fanneya (Censorship of Creative Arts), a veiled filter stands between the viewer and the original photographs. The images alter the representation of women in diverse ways and point at the ideological role of such iconoclastic interventions in addressing the complexity of image politics in Egypt. Parallax Error is a found photography project that proposes that these doctored images are part of a patriarchal state censorship process and can be read as indicative of visual culture sensibilities in Muslim dominated countries in the Middle East and North Africa regions. The photographic content in the publications form a representational order in the history of art that maps out a visual culture embedded within European aesthetic traditions. The photography books are anthological productions that offer a chronological pantheon of artistic maestros to appeal to wide- ranging audiences. The canonical collections can convey certain misogynistic tendencies, which have a commonplace in the art culture of popular photographic history. This visual economy uses the human body as a place of ideological struggle to fuse the body with the body politic. Photography as a medium entered into the history of visual art in the 1840s and throughout the 20th century gained critical traction in the modernist era of the arts. The original book images found emerge from a diverse series of photographic practices and aesthetic 1 The archive of photographs has been taken from a total of three publications: Photographers A-Z, 100 Contemporary Artist and The Photo Book A History. The majority of the archive come from the Taschen book Photographers A-Z, a compendium of mostly twentieth-century works arranged in biographical order. The other publications are: 100 Contemporary Artist, Taschen, The Photobook A History Vol 1, Phaidon Press. All of these books were available in limited numbers in branches of Diwan bookstore across Cairo. Preface I moved to Cairo at the end of the revolution and lived through the transition from the last days of optimism in 2011 to curfews and a coup d’état. During this time, I noticed image censorship of books in art spaces, like the Townhouse Gallery library, where representations of the naked body had been covered up. I had also requested a new photography textbook, The Photograph, published by Oxford University Press, for one of the courses I teach at the American University in Cairo. The university administrator later told me that the book in question had been banned because it was considered unsuitable and haram (immoral). I was surprised by this hullabaloo when I talked to the university bookstore manager and learnt that there is a government agency in charge of monitoring all visual materials. I decided to visit bookstores across the city to see what visual culture publications were available and if they had been modified. I found a limited selection of photo books and discovered that nude images had indeed been doctored for public sale. I started buying them in order to collect an archive of censored visual materials in Egypt. Parallax Error: The Aesthetics of Image Censorshipe Ronnie Close 74 membrana “The collision of image politics opens up an intriguing series of misrecognitions passed between the original photographer, Egyptian censorship formulas and the public audience.” 1