Civic education CeNSorShiP From the very beginning, governments have understood and feared the power of images and have thus tried to direct it to their own purposes. Italy In Italy, during the First World War, photographs of the conflict were subject to military control. Istituto During Fascism, most LUCE visual communication was handled by the Istituto LUCE, founded in 1924 by Benito Mussolini. At the outbreak of World War II, a War Department was created at LUCE. Of the material produced from 1940 to 1943, around 10% was censored for various reasons, ideological ones being the majority. The pictures had to show the bravery of the Italian soldiers funerals and the return of the bodies while attitudes that did not show pride but rather fear were concealed. 19 The USA In the USA, thousands of images of the Great Depression were censored, judged not suitable to meet the criteria the photographers had been given for the type of images required, since they had been hired to show the problems, but they were also supposed to do so without obliterating all hope. Therefore, the negatives were mutilated occasionally several holes were punched in the photograph to prevent the image being used even in cropped form but not completely destroyed. The censored and approved images have recently been digitised. groUP WorK Choose one of the following activities. activity 1 activity 3 Split up into groups. Identify the key words in the passage above. Explain why many pictures of the Great Depression were censored. Go online and find a few examples of censored photos. Find out what happened to the censored photos. Create a poster or slideshow explaining why the photos shown have been censored. activity 4 Go online and read article 21 of the Italian Constitution. activity 2 Translate the article into English. Find out what the acronym LUCE means. Go online and find if and how information was controlled by people in power in other European countries back then. What is the article about? Does it contain the so-called riserva di legge ? What does it mean and how could you translate that into English? Find out whether the material was censored. Share your research with your class and discuss. 178 Creative artS