JOANNE LEAH
Joanne Leah is an artist/activist. Her work collaborates with sex workers, members of the trans community and non-traditional models to depict real bodies in ways that are under-represented by mainstream Instagram. These images are fantastic colorful obfuscations of nude bodies.
Leah’s recent photography is a direct commentary on Instagram policy of differentiating paintings of nudity from photography. With colorful, almost neon swaths of paint, Leah asks why paintings of nude bodies are ok but not paint “on” nude bodies. She brings our attention to the natural beauty of the human form, asking if “real” bodies need to be dressed up to be beautiful. In the examples below, Leah crops and edits her works to further questions how far one can obfuscate these images before the AI overlords no longer find them obscene.
From the beginning Leah’s posts have been deleted. She started fighting back three years ago with a petition to stop social media censorship. More recently Leah helped organize the October 2019 sit down between artists and Instagram policy makers. She continues to run the Artists Against Social Media Censorship website chronicling the experiences of censored artists.
IMAGE CREDIT: Images in top slideshow: Forgetting Myself, 2020, One Day At A Time, 2020, Purely Decorative, 2016, Revisitor, 2018. All Images Courtesy The Artist, Joanne Leah