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My initial proposal was to explore the notion of what is perceived to be "private" in terms of people in public spaces vs the hard reality that there is in fact a prolific amount of surveillance being used nearly everywhere we go. I wanted to explore this subject further as a photographer, and test my own boundaries by taking my own set of images which would challenge my own ethical and moral opinions in respect of the privacy of others. Following the completion of my project for this module, I believe that I have successfully achieved my objectives, and have produced a series of photographic work depicting people performing the banalities of life, using a blend of surveillance-like techniques and covert style shooting. Barbara Pollock wrote an article in 2014 entitled "Changes in technology and conventions are raising questions about what it means to invade others’ privacy in the name of art" which discusses the changing attitude of public surveillance." where she also considers the impact of surveillance in our daily lives. In the article, she cites the following quote: “Because of the proliferation of public surveillance cameras, you can’t help being aware that you are being recorded by a camera, just by walking down the street. You have no idea who is collecting this information or how it is being analyzed [SIC] and how close the analysts tracking you are,” says ICP curator Christopher Phillips.
Streulis aesthetic is a lot more clearer, richer and polished in appearance to mine. This is for several technical and logistical reasons including, unfortunately at the moment the time of year and the weather, which limits my ambient light availability to somewhere between grey and greyer. I cannot wait for the spring/summer months when I can drop my iso, increase my shutter speed and throw caution to the wind with my aperture for maximum artistic quality control!! There is also Streulis equipment to take into account, he uses a telephoto lens, which although I cant find the details for, I can tell that it far outshines any lens I have available to use. I would hazard an educated guess that he probably shoots with a lens of at least 400mm with a very wide aperture of somewhere around f2.8 - this accounts for the clarity, rich tones and noise-free aesthetic. This gives his images an almost cinematic quality - no doubt useful for the billboard sized prints he displays of his work!
Originally, I envisaged my project developing towards a scenario influenced by Sophie Calle, whereby I would pick a person and follow them. I wanted to document their day as much as I could, and really immerse my camera (and self) into the familiarity of their life. But whilst researching into the feasibility of my intended work, I found out that this could cause me a legal issue, if the person in question felt I was causing them harassment. Instead I adopted a less invasive approach where I could photograph people in their cars, through car windows, or in someway being obscured by parts of my car. The resulting photos have a very different feel to the majority of the ones I have chosen for my final book edit. I felt that I didn't want to pursue this line of enquiry any further having exasperated the potential and feeling unsatisfied with the aesthetic. This is why I have focused on my number one objective of capturing the foibles of everyday life, using both invasive and non-invasive methods to get photos without consent or knowledge from the subject. I also tried various methods of capturing my images. I used two very different lenses, one which was 120mm-400mm telephoto which was large and very heavy to use (not very covert) - I wanted to try this lens for the following reasons. The first being that it enabled me to be at a further distance to my subject, and this allowed me to less conspicuous about what I was doing. This in turn then gave me confidence to take more shots as it was less confrontational. The other reason by contrast was that I wanted to feel like I was being invasive and obvious - although in truth this still being done from a safe distance, or safely locked in my car! I often mixed using this lens with my smaller and much less conspicuous 24-70mm lens. I did feel that it was quite restrictive having a 70mm focal length which was sum what frustrating at times. However generally I think this was the best lens as being smaller and less obvious it enabled me to blend into the crowd a lot more, and thus enabled me to focus on taking photos - rather than being distracted about how I was feeling about the process. I also tried a mixture of shooting styles, from straight shooting using the viewfinder to shooting 'from the hip' . Finally I settled on "wearing" the camera, by means of using a strap around my neck, and positioning the camera at chest height. I then attached a hidden remote shutter release to the camera which I then ran down through the sleeve on my coat. This made it possible for me to experiment whilst on location, and make the photographic process a lot easier. Therefore I was able (and felt comfortable) with going into shops to shoot. This method, also enabled me to get extremely close to the subject. This arrangement did not interfere with me being able to use the traditional viewfinder method if i wanted to, and "throwing caution to the wind" I did take many photographs in plain sight, which in reality did not cause me any problems. My post-shoot process, was just a simple case of deleting shots, and adjusting crops to strengthen narratives or heighten tensions as shown below: I also spent a day out shooting onto 35mm black and white film, using my Pentax k1000, however, unfortunately the film got accidentally exposed by someone opening the back of the camera before I had finished the roll. This is definitely something I am very keen to experiment with again, as soon as possible, especially in terms being able to optimise the grainy unpolished quality that a film camera brings. In terms of the compilation of book, the editing process was the most difficult part, in terms of deciding what to include and what to disregard. I tried utilising the opinions of those around me, but soon realised that by trying taking an "average " point of view of their advice was making the final edit somewhat bland because of contrasting opinions. I also found that the inclusion of my original favourite images, by comparison to the rest, weakened the strength in some of the pages and upset the overall rhythm because as part of a series or set, they didn't fit.
Having taken about 1500 images in total to find the 31 that have made the final cut (so far). I have tried many different combinations and now feel happy with my final choice, as it showcased a good range of styles and narratives. With regards to the layout of the book, originally I had envisaged it having a softback square format that could easily host portrait and landscape images, but after experimenting with this style and having looked at lots of other artist monologue books, I decided to opt for the softback, landscape version, with each page having a white border around the image to frame it. This framing encapsulates each image as a stand alone piece, but by piecing it together in the format of a book and then planning the sequence in this way, I feel images can be paired and even grouped to create a narrative sequential flow through the pages. The pages are also infrequently interrupted by page breaks by way of the insertion of blank pages, I feel this will allow the viewer breathing space and permit time to reflect on the images and flow.
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After looking at some artists who have made their work using online streaming CCTV cameras, I found myself liking the aesthetic - with the grubby screens, scratched, weathered and low-res. It makes their images easier to identify with a definite sense of surveillance, whilst I have adopted a more 'street' perspective - surveillance nonetheless, there is a feel to the work of Gaia Light, for example, that has more sinister connotations. I think some of my images shot through car windows have a similar effect. I do like the edits that I have roughly put together here, and I will consider this an option moving forward as I continue to develop my work. In photoshop, I used the gaussian lens blur tool with a small radius of about 4px just to obscure the focus, I then added a 'dirty' texture using the overlay blending mode with around 66% opacity and finally added a vignette edge to help centralise and frame the image. I applied this same edit to a small number of my photos as shown above to see if it change the way of viewing and meaning. The result of which is - I quite like the aesthetic - it does seem to add a more obvious direction of surveillance to my images. Moving forward, I will experiment with different ways of pursuing this line of enquiry to achieve a more natural visual that has the same feel as this.
I knew right from day one that this project had to be a book in the sense that viewing a book is a private intimate experience - the format concluding the full circle of private > public > private - Here I am choosing which images i will keep or disregard and then experimenting with which images work well with others to create a base layout for the book.
WALKER EVANSWalker Evans’s Subway Passengers were made on New York City underground trains in the 1930s with small hidden cameras, allowing Evans to record the natural, un-posed faces of the city’s inhabit  VITO ACCONCIEvery day for one month in 1969 Vito Acconci followed a randomly selected stranger on the streets of New York, recording his experiences with photographs and a written account.  MERRY ALPERN Photographer Merry Alpern hid a video camera inside her handbag so she could take it into the harshly lit fitting rooms of a number of fashion boutiques, and found that it revealed a disconcertingly unfamiliar image of herself: “I had always seen myself quite differently when I looked in the mirror. Suddenly I no longer knew what I really looked like”.  What right do governments, corporations, and individuals have to collect and retain information on your daily communications? What tools—both today and in the past—have been used to monitor your activities? What are the immediate and far-reaching effects?
These questions unite the nine bodies of work selected for the fall 2014 exhibition “Watching You, Watching Me.” This upcoming installment of our Moving Walls documentary photography series explores how photography has been used both as an instrument of surveillance and as a tool to document, expose, and challenge the impact of surveillance on civil liberties, human rights, and basic freedoms. The projects were selected through an open-call process, and we were inspired by the range of ways documentary artists are tackling the challenge of using photography to visualize something that is both omniscient and covert. Many projects we received highlighted the technologies and mechanisms that enable surveillance, while others focused on the activities of governments, industries, and corporations that are creating and employing such tools. Some projects were international in scope, while others explored the theme from a very personal point of view. There were a range of artistic approaches, from appropriating existing imagery (for example from historical archives, networked CCTV cameras, or Google Street View), to using surveillance-related technologies in the image-making process, and employing more traditional documentary language to capture fleeting historical events. The nine artists and projects selected are as follows:
“Watching You, Watching Me” will be open to the public at the Open Society office in New York from November 4, 2014 to May 8, 2015. Exposed is a compelling survey of 250 works that tackles subjects both iconic and taboo, questioning the ambiguity of surveillance and voyeurism.
The prolific use of mobile phones, cameras, CCTV, and the internet has ensured that we are never alone or unwatched, and that each of us is cast as unwitting voyeurs ourselves. New technology has enabled us to become amateur artists and removed the cloak of innocence that used to shroud candid, amateur shots. Dramatic as it may sound, we increasingly live in a Big Brother society where every move is watched and charted, in, for the most part, the interest of “safety”. We are members of a post-9/11 society that is increasingly content to allow a higher degree of surveillance and intrusion into our private lives as this intrusion supposedly offers more protection. The inherently invasive quality of the photograph is discussed by critics, typically from a more theoretical standpoint than an actual examination of the historical use of photography as a tool of investigation and documentation. Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera, at Tate Modern, takes as a starting point the unwitting subject – the focal point of the photograph captured innocent and unaware. The exhibition, aims to complete this often negated aspect of art history through the thematic arrangement of five specific strands of photography: the hidden/unseen photographer; voyeuristic photography; the cult of the celebrity and paparazzi; the camera as witness to violence; and surveillance. Exposed demonstrates by its execution that the subject is never as innocent as it may seem. Whether one of Brassai’s prostitutes who are, by their profession, always on stage and posing for a potential customer, or the celebrity figures photographed by paparazzi such as Ron Gallela, the audience is never wholly oblivious. The exhibition includes more than 250 works of photography and film, brought together by Phillips and Baker in order to comprehensively illustrate each thematic strand. Surveillance photography, from a private eye photographing a cheating husband to international espionage, has perhaps been the least examined in an art historical and critical sense as it is usually seen as a scientific tool rather than an art object. Surveillance footage necessarily involves the use of film as well as photographic cameras and has been used as an artistic tool by artists, like Bruce Nauman, since the 1970s. Nauman’s Video Corridor(1968) consisted of two surveillance cameras placed at either end of two parallel floor-to-ceiling walls so that the viewer was faced with concurrent images of themselves. Through the camera’s placement and the spatial arrangement of the walls to create a claustrophobic space, the viewer stands within a panoptic enclosure in which they exist as both audience and subject. Video Corridor encapsulates the reality of contemporary Machiavellian society: how often do we walk into a store and see ourselves depicted on carefully situated observable camera screens? Works by Nauman, along with artists like Merry Alpern and Thomas Demand, examine and illustrate the prevalence of surveillance footage and the circulated image in mainstream society and how their availability impact our own perceptions of ourselves. By simply leaving one’s house, the viewer steps onto an urban stage and becomes an unwitting performer. The art critic and curator, Michael Rush, states that, “It is a short leap from looking (fixing one’s gaze upon another) to voyeurism (taking delight in extended gazing) to spying (surreptitiously studying the actions of another).” As children we are told not to stare, because staring bridges that gap between innocently looking and the voyeuristic gaze. Photographers, like Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Weegee (aka Arthur Fellig), are difficult to categorise as they both look and spy, and have certain voyeuristic qualities to their work. Weegee originally worked as a freelance news photographer during the 1930s, chasing down often violent crime scenes via the police radios he kept with him in his car. The resultant images portray an often harsh reality, documenting the aftermath of crime and neglect. There is a vulnerable element to many of Weegee’s images as he captures the fleeting emotions of crime: the fear, the cruelty, the misery, and the defeat. His photographs, in many ways, could thematically fall within each strand of Exposed. Weegee, like Henri Carter-Bresson and Jacob Riis, among others, photographed the “decisive” moment, those moments lost by staged photography, but encapsulated by candid street photography. To differentiate between voyeurism and street photography has become an increasingly difficult task. Jacob Riis, an American journalist during the late 19th century, was perhaps one of the first street photographers. Riis used the element of surprise, often bursting into dark tenements and quickly taking a flash photograph before scurrying away. He was one of the first to use flash photography in this way – as a form of social awareness using the photograph in order to reveal the depravation and poverty existent in the New York tenements. Baker argues that it is the very fact that the tenement dwellers were caught unaware and by surprise that the images are so powerful, as the photographs capture the true reality of their existence. Walker Evans, whose work is also included in the exhibition, typifies an artist who would fall outside the category of a “street photographer” as his work is of rural early twentieth century society and is slightly more staged. However, Evans, like Diane Arbus after him, had the unnerving ability to emphasise with his subjects in such a way as to draw out the hidden emotions of the human psyche. His images of families and children can often be disturbing and uncomfortable as they depict people at the crossroads and in the throes of exploration. The term “voyeuristic photography” is perhaps best exemplified by an artist such as Kohei Yoshiyuki. His photographic series “The Park”, which was first exhibited in 1979 at Komai Gallery in Tokyo, depicts images of heterosexual and homosexual couples engaging in public sexual acts at night in Tokyo parks. Yoshiyuki focuses not just on the couples in his photographs, but the peeping toms that creep up to watch. These images spotlight the fascination with “looking” – an often morbid fascination that causes people to slow down when driving past a fatal car accident on the side of the road. Intrinsic to the act of “looking” is that of desire and fetish: the camera’s eye captures a moment and thereby possesses that moment. Playboy and Hustler magazines have capitalized upon this relationship between image and audience. The viewer cannot touch the naked woman depicted, but they can own the magazine in which the image is presented; desire consummated in effect. Unlike Nan Goldin, who knowingly took on the role of peeping tom, Yoshiyuki distanced himself from such a label by placing an actual voyeur between himself, the camera, and the subject. Goldin’s photographic series, Ballad of Sexual Dependency, documents the intimate and private moments of her friends, allowing her audience a glimpse into her world. Her subjects know her, and one assumes, had given some form of permission to Goldin to photograph at whim. There is thus a sense of familiarity and comfort in the photographs as they are less awkwardly staged than images by a photographer of an anonymous / unknown subject and consequently have an inherent eroticism. By inviting Goldin in on private moments, usually invisible to the camera’s lens, they are inviting her to participate in that act which is photographed. Contemporary artists, such as Tracy Emin with her Unmade Bed (1999), follow in the footsteps of Goldin, inviting the audience to participate in her private life as she makes it public. Goldin and Emin specifically invite the audience into their lives, thereby acting as their own subject, and raising questions about participation, distance, observation, and the sanctity of one’s public image. The knowing subject, such as those captured by Shizuka Yokomizo, is an empowered subject as it can create an image of how they would like to be seen. Yokomizo’s series Stranger (1998-2000) was centred on this idea of the participatory photography: subjects were sent an anonymous letter asking them to stand in front of their window at a specific time and date and to stand still whilst she photographed them (she stipulated in the letter that they should close their blinds should they not wish to participate). Yokomizo never revealed her identity and existed as an anonymous entity, appearing as nothing but a dark shadow committing an intimate act. The very participation of the subject in this series exhibits an extraordinary degree of trust and security in the unknown photographer as they are entrusting her with their public persona within that most private of places: the home. Exposed illustrates the difficulty that photographers have with creating a relationship between themselves and their subject, whether they want that relationship to be somewhat anonymous as with Yokomizo’s works, or whether they want their relationship to be personal, as with Goldin. The photograph is an inherently erotic object, because it visually captures the human form on paper. When photography was first introduced as an artistic medium during the nineteenth century, it was looked upon in fear by many who saw the image as “stealing” a part of one’s soul. As a printed piece of paper the photograph was seen to contain a portion of the human element, thus the inanimate object became somewhat real and desirable. In much the same way that the camera’s lens captured this human element, so does the audience through the act of looking. The politics of looking is an integral aspect to photographers like Robert Mapplethorpe, for whom the historic and prolific image of the “erotic” white female nude became a focus. Mapplethorpe took this subject and subverted it: his iconic images of the male form, and the inclusion of genitalia, shocked many conventional critics for whom this outright embracing of the male nude and of the New York S & M scene straddled the line between photography and pornography. Mapplethorpe photographed intimate sexual acts and captured them in an artistic and masterful way: his images are highly stylized, technically correct, and illustrate his interest in the inherent beauty of the human form. Although he generated a tremendous amount of controversy during his career, it is his images rather than the public backlash that will endure. The value of the erotic image as an art object could be debated ad infinitum, but Mapplethorpe proved, without a doubt, the cultural value of its inclusion within art historical discourse. Phillips and Baker have chosen photographs that embody this element of the erotic and that illustrate the critical significance of the image as a provocative artistic tool. The photograph is the gaze made real, concretely exhibiting the dialectical relationship between observer and observed and calling into question the legitimacy of looking. Exposed opened 28 May and continued until 3 October 2010 at Tate Modern. www.tate.org.uk/modern/. Niamh Coghlan "The series “Mass Surveillance” is the result of a photographic survey of the thousands of publicly accessible webcams live-streaming around the world. It is a reflection about how our daily lives, in general, are constantly monitored and controlled. In documenting this phenomenon, the first impression is that the apparatus of the surveillance camera carries an inescapable and uncanny quality. Pictorially and precisely, its images connote the so-called ”state of exception,” a condition within law when all rules and all laws are suspended. It is the state of exception that underwrites the state of emergency, under which so many places have fallen. While the security camera is intended to protect and police, the public webcam takes on the outward form of entertainment. But more disturbingly, these streaming images are utilized today to underwrite regimes of power, where normal rights of privacy are permanently suspended. “Mass Surveillance” collects images from all over the world: a kindergarten in Japan to the streets of London. Insofar as these images were gathered from the Internet, “Mass Surveillance” presents the apparatus of the traditional surveillance camera in its contemporary iteration, the webcam. Thus, the final images take on the distortions of the device while pushing them further, emphasizing digitalization, pixellation, and the very process of being (re)photographed. Given the physical ubiquity of such cameras today—and add in their footages’ presence on the Internet—and we arrive at a moment where the state of exception is no longer an exception, but a universal." —Gaia Light Since 2010 she has been working on a long-term, perpetually ongoing, project, Mass Surveillance, which is the result of a sustained, photographic-documentary survey of the thousands of publicly accessible webcams available on the Internet. The presence of this wide network of surveillance cameras illustrates how public, as well as private day-to-day activities are constantly monitored and subtly or explicitly controlled. The series is composed of still photos shot with a digital camera through the screen of a computer while attending freely accessible webcams’ live-streaming sessions on the Internet and aims to question the increasingly intricate connections between privacy rights and surveillance needs in the post-9/11 world. - taken from Gaia Lights website MASS SURVEILLANCE 2016 The Mass Surveillance series is a systematic sampling of thousands of publicly accessible webcams, which for very different reasons offer free, live-streaming services and broadcast a range of activities that cover private and public space, urban and domestic environments, and seemingly remote and/or wild landscapes worldwide. The series is composed of still photos shot with a digital camera through the screen of a computer while attending freely accessible webcams' live-streaming sessions on the Internet and aims to question the increasingly intricate connections between privacy rights and surveillance needs in the post-9/11 world. For years I have been documenting all sorts of streams, freely available and easily accessible on the Internet, photographing all kinds of extremes and weird practices happening on surveillance cameras and distributed online, for God knows what reason. I have always been intrigued by the perpetually increasing extent of the popularity of this phenomenon, recognizing a lack of information and, more importantly, of specific and adequate regulation or accountability. The Internet is a gigantic planet, some would say dark planet, and as any other communal experience needs limits, boundaries, and rules in order to healthily and democratically function. Technology is certainly faster than the legislator nowadays, but this should represent an incentive to confront the problem, not an excuse/alibi to remain passive. I believe in the power of visual knowledge and in the progressive force of photography as an important tool to raise consciousness and inspire reflections and actions toward positive changes within the regulatory apparatus of the Internet, especially when related to surveillance practices and abusive interpersonal relations. The Mass Surveillance series is focused on the limits and dangers of the Internet as ideal platform for the broadcast of everyday life, much of which occurs without the subjects or the participants ever knowing they are conscripted “actors” in a strange carnival. This Series is for all of the unaware victims of abusive surveillance practices in the hope that my efforts will suggest/inspire a change in the way the Internet’s wilder practices are perceived today by the majority of aware and unaware citizens and above all by sleeping legislators. In this series and written document above, Gaia talks about the need for "regulation and accountability" on the internet and aims to expose the dangers of "abusive surveillance" which can be found freely online. Again, for me, it is the aesthetic of the images which appeals - harsh vignette, grainy, pixelated, out of focus with camera angles that are taken from up high, all of which make the images feel indecorous - inappropriate.
At some stage, I would like to try and manipulate my images to have this kind of appearance to see how they work and how it changes the meaning. "In our increasingly intrusive electronic culture, how do we delineate the boundary between public and private? “Surveillance Landscapes” is a body of work that interrogates how surveillance technology has changed our relationship to—and understanding of—landscape and place. To produce this work, I hack into surveillance cameras, public webcams, and CCTV feeds in pursuit of the “classical” picturesque landscape. The resulting visual product becomes dislocated from its automated origins and leads to an investigation of land, borders, and power. The very act of surveying a site through these photographic systems implies a dominating relationship between man and place. Ultimately, I hope to undermine these schemes of social control through my blurred, melancholic images—found while exploiting the technological mechanisms of power in our surveillance society." —Marcus DeSieno Images taken from http://www.marcusdesieno.com/surveillance-landscapes/m67a5gdxcw025r88sananaoaefcbr2 I really like the aesthetic of this work - the landscape viewed through the grubby glass of the CCTV lens, does indeed invoke a sense of possession upon me as the viewer. The natural aesthetic of nature obscured by manmade machine.
Of all the practitioners I have looked at, I identify most with the work of Beat Streuli - not necessarily in our motives or self objectives, but certianly in our finished work. In fact on reflection, I am quite astounded by the similarities in our work up to this point. Streulis aesthetic is a lot more clearer, richer and polished in appearance to mine, and this is for several technical and logistical reasons including, the time of year and the weather, which limits my ambient light availability to somewhere between grey and greyer. I cannot wait for the spring/summer months when I can drop my iso, increase my shutter speed and throw caution to the wind with my aperture for maximum artisitic quality control!!
There is also Streulis equipment to take into account, he uses a telephoto lens, which although I cant find the details for, I can tell that it far outshines any lens I have available to use. I would hazard an educated guess that he probably shoots with a lens of at least 400mm with a very wide aperture of somewhere around f2.8 - this accounts for the clarity, rich tones and noise-free aesthetic. This gives his images an almost cinematic quality - no doubt useful for the billboard sized prints he displays of his work!  Garry Winogrand's image of a couple in New York in 1969. Photograph: Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco/Garry WinograndSean O'Hagan Sunday 16 May 2010 00.05 BST Photography," Diane Arbus once said, "was a licence to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do." Arbus, who famously photographed American outsiders and eccentrics, including so-called freaks from carnival shows, also described the lure of the camera thus: "I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do... when I first did it I felt very perverse."
Either quotation could serve as an epigraph to the catalogue for Tate Modern's ambitious exhibition, Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. Here, photography is a licence to spy and pry, to transgress, shock, provoke and, above all, to invade the privacy of others. Exposed is a show about the politics of looking – both through the lens and at the end result. The work is gathered under five themes related to the voyeurism of the lens: street photography, sexually explicit images, celebrity stalking, shots of death and violence, and surveillance. Today, photography itself could be said to be under siege. We live in a digitally driven culture where everyone with a mobile phone is a photographer of sorts. Technology has freed us to bear witness, but it has also made voyeurs of us all. Last year, the death of 27-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan during an Iranian pro-democracy protest was captured on a mobile phone and, according to Time magazine, became "probably the most widely witnessed death in human history". The age of citizen journalism may be well under way, but the internet is also overloaded with images of violence, drunkenness and sexual embarrassment. Here, the humiliation of others often seems to be a defining dynamic. "We cannot blame the camera for what it has done to us," writes Sandra S Phillips, curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in her foreword to the Exposed catalogue. "Nevertheless, it has made certain human predilections much easier to satisfy." AdvertisementFor all that, photography can still shock and repel. Earlier this year, the World Press awards featured a series of images by Farah Abdi Warsameh entitled Stoned to Death, Somalia. The photographs were so graphic that one's immediate instinct was to turn away in horror. Are the images powerful because of the horror they capture? Or do they represent, as one Observer colleague put it, "a kind of pornography of suffering"? Do they jolt us into awareness or inure us even further to the suffering of others? We could ask the same questions of many of the images that will feature in the Tate show's 'Witnessing Violence' section: graphic images of executions, exhumed bodies and victims of bombings. Chronologically, this begins with an image of an American civil war burial party taken in 1865 by John Reekie, and ends with Larry Clark's portrait of a heavily pregnant young woman injecting herself with heroin from his early 70s Tulsa series. That's quite a range of human suffering but, as Phillips notes, "the terrible fascination of looking at suffering and death, the moral ambiguity of the act, is as pertinent now as it was during the American civil war". What has changed, as Susan Sontag predicted in her 1977 book On Photography, is the amount of such imagery and the ease with which we can access it. "Once one has seen such images," she wrote, "one has started down the road of seeing more – and more. Images transfix. Images anaesthetise." Today, the morality of what might be called extreme reportage is an even more vexed issue. Likewise, the terrain of the sexually explicit. Again, the range of photographs on display at Tate Modern is broad and frequently provocative. Both Robert Mapplethorpe and Nobuyoshi Araki deal in what many people might consider hardcore sexual imagery and are drawn, in their different ways, to the ritualistic. Perhaps it's just me, but what once seemed shocking in their work now seems familiar to the point of banal. More intriguing are the voyeuristic images on display. In a picture from his brothel series, Chez Suzy (1932), Brassaï frames in a mirror a couple kissing on a bed. What once was considered arousing now looks quite restrained, but the sense that both the photographer and the viewer are prying remains strong. AdvertisementThis is even more the case in Merry Alpern's grainy shots of prostitutes and their clients in her series, Dirty Windows (1994), taken clandestinely through the bathroom window of a sex club on Wall Street. Interestingly, Brassaï's brothel photographs are now seen as ground-breaking social reportage, whereas Alpern's are viewed as art photography, which tells us as much about the changing nature of the politics of curating as that of the politics of looking. The idea that viewing such morally problematic images might make us complicit in the production of ever-more transgressive images is one that haunts this show. The curators seem to have broached it somewhat conceptually by creating a semi-dark corridor in which the dim lights just about illuminate Kohei Yoshiyuki's series, The Park. Taken with newly available infrared film in 1970, they show kneeling men behind bushes spying on the nocturnal lovemaking of young couples. (Yoshiyuki later said of this body of work that he had started off photographing voyeurs and ended up becoming one.) For me, the most intriguing section of the show examines our surveillance culture. Here, the images are, as Phillips points out, "voyeuristic in anticipation". Again, the watcher's gaze is driven by technology, in this instance the security cameras that silently monitor from a distance individuals, groups, entire cities. The population of London is now one of the most watched in the world and the fact that we are being photographed 24/7 without our permission seems, as the show's curator, Simon Baker, posits, "to be somehow linked to our lack of awareness of what is going on". Again, we cannot blame the camera for what it has done to us, but, as this intriguing show will illustrate, we should perhaps be more aware than ever of its relentless gaze, its power to shape and to distort our lives. Since its invention, the camera has been used to make images surreptitiously and satisfy the desire to see what is hidden. Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera examines photography’s role in voyeuristic looking from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present day. It includes pictures taken by professional photographers and artists, but also images made without our knowledge on a daily basis through the proliferation of CCTV. The exhibition is divided into five thematic sections: The Unseen Photographer, Celebrity and the Public Gaze, Voyeurism and Desire, Witnessing Violence, and Surveillance. In each case, the nature and character of invasive looking is evident not only in the images themselves, but also in the ways in which the viewer is implicated in acts of voyeurism. Rather than blame the camera for showing illicit or forbidden material, Exposed explores the uneasy relationship between making and viewing images that deliberately cross lines of privacy and propriety. This room presents two sets of photographs from opposite ends of the twentieth century, both of which rely on specific equipment and strategies. Walker Evans’s Subway Passengers were made on New York City underground trains in the 1930s with small hidden cameras, allowing Evans to record the natural, un-posed faces of the city’s inhabitants. Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s Heads, by contrast, were taken on the streets of New York in 2000, also without their subjects’ knowledge or permission, but this time through an elaborate series of hidden cameras and automatic flashes that were triggered as people walked past. One of his unwitting targets took legal action against diCorcia, which resulted in a landmark ruling that the artist’s right to self-expression took precedence over the subject’s right to their own image. Room 2The notion of the Unseen Photographer also extends to the practices of photographers that enable them to ‘capture’ images stealthily or by surprise. Working in the slums of New York at the end of the nineteenth century, Jacob Riis’s pictures of tenement dwellers include those sleeping or so tired and inebriated they are barely aware of him entering their rooms and setting off his bright flash bulb. Paul Strand used a false lens to photograph poor immigrants while seeming to point his camera the other way. Hired by the National Child Labor Committee, Lewis Hine’s revelatory photographs of children working in mines and factories appear to show the subjects’ awareness of the photographer, but were taken without the permission of the factory owners. Room 3This room presents work by some of the twentieth century’s most important photographers. In each case, they exploit the camera’s ability to create images without the knowledge of some, or all, of their subjects. Ben Shahn used a lateral viewfinder to make candid street photographs. Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed people from above to great visual effect, while Lee Friedlander and Harry Callahan seem to sneak up on their subjects from behind. Garry Winogrand and Robert Frank’s lightning-fast snapshots of street life suggest photography working faster than the eye to capture a split-second slice of real life. Winogrand liked to use an extra wide lens, so that people on the edges of his photographs wouldn’t have realised they were in the frame. Many of these photographers produced series of works on the same theme or in the same location, epitomised by Harry Callahan’s sequence of images Women Lost in Thought, made in 1950. With the development of conceptual art in the late 1960s artists began to use photography to document performances or actions. Every day for one month in 1969 Vito Acconci followed a randomly selected stranger on the streets of New York, recording his experiences with photographs and a written account. Sophie Calle has made a number of works that explore the artist’s voyeuristic nature, whether following strangers or employing others to follow her. In 1981 she took a job as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel with the intention of gathering information about its occupants. Photographer Merry Alpern hid a video camera inside her handbag so she could take it into the harshly lit fitting rooms of a number of fashion boutiques, and found that it revealed a disconcertingly unfamiliar image of herself: ‘I had always seen myself quite differently when I looked in the mirror. Suddenly I no longer knew what I really looked like’. Artist Emily Jacir also appeared in front of the camera, inserting herself into the frame of a live webcam trained on the main square of Linz, Austria over the course of a month. Though she is barely visible in the resulting pictures, her diaristic text directs the viewer to her presence. http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/exposed/exposed-voyeurism-surveillance-and-camera-exhibition-guide-4 This photo series questions surveillance in our city |
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