Censored

French photographer Tiane Doan na Champassak's book Censored features more than 4,000 photographs taken from 1970s Thai softcore magazines such as Siam's Guy (สยามหนุ่ม). The book was published last month, and is available with six different cover designs.

The nudity in the images is self-censored (hence the book's title), to conform to the Thai obscenity law, though the book celebrates this censorship as a creative act in itself. The magazines employed artists to draw symbols and shapes over the models' erogenous zones, and the book crops the photos to focus on these painted and stencilled graphics. (Ironically, some pictures are censored with cigarette packets, which are themselves subject to censorship today.)

Thai erotic magazines are still prohibited from publishing frontal nudity, and they are occasionally withdrawn if they go too far. (For example, sales of Cute magazine were suspended in 2007.) Similarly, Thai television routinely censors nudity, guns, alcohol, and cigarettes by blurring parts of the screen, a technique parodied at the start of the comedy film SARS Wars: Bangkok Zombie Crisis (ขุนกระบี่ผีระบาด).