Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera
28 May - 3 October, 2010
Media Partner: Time Out
Tate Modern Gallery - Admission Charge
The Unseen Photographer
The face of the subject of Woman, New York (1916) by Paul Strand (1890 1976) is both beguiling and puzzling. She is aged between 60 and 70, her grey hair pulled back from a face that has not so much been neglected but pulverized, utterly crushed by poverty. Her clothing – little more than rags – hang about a withered neck. Only her eyes retain a glimmer of the vitality that must once have been hers. Sunken in their setting of crumpled flesh, the fathomless pits carry a mixture of puzzlement and resentment, emotions no doubt wrung from a dire past and bleak present.
In the earlier days of photography, explains Sandra Philips, Senior Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and curator of Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera, now open at Tate Modern, many people were unaware of developments in photographic technology and didn’t know they were being ‘taken’ when the flash bulb popped. . Interestingly, the language of photography was already established by the late 1800s, with phrases like ‘caught’ or ‘captured’ on camera, or ‘being shot’ already in use. Philips describes these as the violent language of criminality.
On display at the Exposed exhibition are a number of devices that carried hidden cameras; a shoe, a walking cane and a concealed vest camera that dates from 1886. This part of the exhibition includes images of urban poverty so shocking that I felt at once ashamed and privileged to witness them; shame that other humans could be let sink so low and privilege at being given a window into the lives of otherwise disregarded people. At this point I began to ask: why am I here, looking into the lives of people that didn’t ask to be under scrutiny, that hardly knew of the photographic technology that captured their images? We who belong to the media age, who know of the fifteen minutes of fame available to us all, are used to being scrutinised, photographed, held up to the light, be it on CCTV or on our friends’ cameras and mobile phones. But even we feel a degree of discomfort about it all, that something is not quite right.
In Europe until the Middle Ages, most images were created to illustrate angels and saints and, as John Berger wrote, what was not there. The scientific progress of the Renaissance, combined with the burgeoning materialistic outlook, changed all of that. Artists were commissioned to create images of the tangible world. A whole new cult of seeing had been born. Optical devices had been in use since the 1400s when man travelled the world by ocean, and used quadrants and astrolabes to establish his position in the globe by charting the heavens. As early as 1727 Johann Schulze discovered that silver nitrate crystals darkened on exposure to sunlight. It was only a matter of time before Schulze’s discovery was put to use. The first commercial ‘chemical’ images became available in the 1830s. However, the cult of seeing had a downside.
Celebrity and the public gaze
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| WeeGee (Arthur H. Fellig)
Marilyn Monroe ca 1950s Gelatin silver print International Center of Photography, New York, Gift of Wilma Wilcox, 1993 ©/Weegee/ International Center of Photography/Getty Images |
Exposed shows that the act of stalking has a longer history than we may think. Untitled (Actress Réjane entering the street) was taken by Giuseppe Primoli (1851 – 1927) in the 1880s, while New York (1969) by Garry Winogrand (1928 – 84) is the image of a young woman alongside a couple kissing. Philips explained how the use of wide-angled lenses enabled photographers to snap subjects without their even being aware of it. Certain subjects, of course, relished having their pictures taken and it is no surprise that Exposed features the famous Weegee (Arthur H. Fellig, 1889 - 1968) image of Marilyn Monroe with her skirt rising heavenwards over that street vent.
Voyeurism and desire
Exposed does not balk at verboten activity. Milk (from the series Lusty Lady) by Cammie Toulour (b. 1968) features a large-breasted young woman lactating into the opened mouth of a delighted young man. Dirty Windows (1994) by Merry Alpern (b. 1955) is a series of 12 photos taken through the windows of a brothel, while in Untitled, New York#1 (1998) by Mitch Epstein, we see a couple having sex, photographed through the window of a New York apartment.
There is no doubt that our cornucopia of optical and communication devices have brought the world to our feet in ways unimaginable a century ago. We have the technological capability to see everything, from the foetus developing in the womb to galaxies in the furthest reaches of space. We routinely watch intimate physical examinations on mid-evening television. We clamour to appear on ‘reality’ television shows, our lives no longer our own but reduced to spectator sport, a spectacle, a series of images. The deed no longer matters so much as the witnessing of it, the seeing eye of the viewer somehow legitimising our activity, pinning us in place, making our vapid lives somehow more ‘real’.
Witnessing violence
Exposed gets even darker, featuring The suicided daughter of the Burgomeister of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany, 19th April 1945, taken by prolific photographer Lee Miller (1907 – 1970) is the disturbing photo of a dead young woman in a Nazi uniform. Fire at the Hotel Ambassador (1959) by Marcello Geppetti (1933 – 98) is a series of four photographs witness the steps involved in the death of a young woman as she jumps from the hotel window to escape a fire. In the final image she is a crumpled heap on the ground, surrounded by a group of forlorn policemen. This dark and frightening section of the exhibition contains many more images bearing witness to the follies of humanity; political ideology, hatred and greed. In an exhibition like Exposed, it being a metaphor of itself, the attention turns back on us. We draw no lines where the taking of images is concerned. There is nothing that cannot be recorded or that is unrecordable, either by virtue of available technology or by the nature of the material. All lines have been crossed, all barriers broken. We witness the fallout of war and natural disaster with the same detachment as we listen to the sports’ results. Indeed, we can now watch disaster while it is actually happening. It is as if our powerlessness to intervene in a situation is subsumed by our satisfaction in the ability to witness it. In our ability to look and see, we are like mini-gods, present in an ever-present present, this ‘god’s eye-view’ that has been with us since the Renaissance.
Surveillance
In the eerie Surveillance section, Golf Five Zero watchtower (known to the British Army as ‘Borucki Sanger') Crossmaglen Security Force Base, South Armagh, (1999) by Jonathan Olley, (b. 1967). Simon Baker, new curator of photographer at Tate Modern, explains that surveillance technology can be hidden completely, can be visible but unobtrusive, or very brutally obvious. In the above image, an unremarkable street of suburban houses has been riven, completely dominated by the festering, dark mass of the military watchtower. Just as unsettling is Isolation Room, CBP, San Ysidro CA, 2004, by Richard Ross (b. 1947), the bleak image of a pristine, modernistic chamber designed solely for the purpose of observing another human being. Here, my mind swings to the ideal of the panopticon. In 1785 social theorist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832) created the idea of the panopticon, a prison built in the shape of a round tower, where one guard could watch all of the prisoners, all of the time. The thinking behind it was that the prisoners would behave well all of the time, if they thought they were being watched some of the time. The panopticon was created on the assumption that watched people behave well simply because they think they are being watched. Interestingly, Bentham established his idea in parallel with the emergence of photography.
Personal Surveillance
In the final section, Exposed swings from the political to the personal and includes four of Sophie Calle’s Hotel Room photos, montages of the artist’s own possessions. This section of the exhibition forces me to ask: do we tolerate the surveillance culture because it has given us a starring role? On considering Exposed, no activity is too banal, too intimate to be recorded. Many of us have willingly posted our own images on internet sites, like Facebook. It is not enough, any more, to simply be good at and enjoy a pursuit; we have to be seen to do it. Television contests abound for about every activity under the sun, from cooking to car driving.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
I cannot close this piece without mentioning the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), whose work is included in the exhibition. He was famous for his ‘street subjects’, that is, photos of unknown people in everyday settings. His photograph, Hyères, France, (1932) is a good demonstration of the difference between surveillance images and artistic composition. In Hyères, the photographer is leaning over a balcony and photographing a subject in the street below, a cyclist, a dark silhouette against the variety of pale shapes and textures of the rest of the image. The cyclist is a detail in a tapestry, a note in a piece of music. Take the subject from its surroundings and the composition falls apart. Surveillance, however, is about the pursuit or stalking of the subject in any and every context. The surroundings do not matter. In short, surveillance is the antithesis of creative composition.
There is much, much more on view – over 300 images and installations and be warned – Exposed is as troubling as it is beguiling, as shocking as it is entertaining. Ultimately, Exposedis about us; what we do, what we view and how we are viewed. It is open until October 3, and is essential viewing for all students of photography, surveillance and human nature.
Mary Phelan, 2010