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Exposed Voyeurism Surveillance and the Camera /anglais
Have we become a society of voyeurs? The proliferation of cell-phone cameras, YouTube videos, and reality television series would certainly suggest that this is so. Pictures can now be made using infrared technology to penetrate darkness or satellites to create omniscient views. If our capacity to look seems increasingly boundless, however, it also threatens to make us a nation under surveillance. Amid endless political debates about terrorism, the security camera has become one of the icons of our age. Aided and abetted by the camera, voyeurism and surveillance provoke uneasy questions about who is looking at whom. Yet there have been surprisingly few attempts to examine the history of might be called invasive looking. Published to coincide with a major exhibition at Tate Modern, "Exposed" aims to fill this critical void. Recognizing that voyeurism has inspired photographers since the inception of the medium, this book reveals the myriad ways in which artists have probed its fascinations, dangers, and cultural significance. The imagery collected here, ranging from the 1870s to the present day, presents an alternately shocking, illuminating, and witty perspective on subjects both iconic and taboo. From shortly after the invention of photography, hidden cameras in public places and voyeuristic treatments of sexuality raised questions about the new medium's uses that are still rehearsed today. The invasive techniques of paparazzi, amateur shots of disasters from the Hindenburg to 9/11, police surveillance photography and the recent trend of self-documentation of sex, crime and other private acts are all examined and explored by leading critics, alongside the work of some of the leading artists of the past 100 years. The contributors include Simon Baker, Philip Brookman, Carol Squiers, Marta Gili and Richard B. Woodward.
- GenresPhotographyNonfictionArt
256 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
July 15, 2010
A Society of Voyeurs: To This We've Come
EXPOSED: VOYEURISM, SURVEILLANCE, AND THE CAMERA SINCE 1870 is the official catalogue for a massive photography exhibition created with the collaboration of the Tate Modern where it is now on exhibit in London and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art where it opens in October of this year, moving on to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in the spring of 2011. It is an ingenious concept for an exhibition curated by Sandra S. Phillips of SFMOMA who also contributes the fine essay LOOKING OUT, LOOKING IN: VOYEURISM AND ITS AFFINITIES FROM THE BEGINNING OF PHOTOGRAPHY that opens this well-designed sophisticated catalogue/art book.
Phillips begins her examination of the subject 'We cannot blame the camera for what it has done to us; nevertheless, it has made certain human predilections much easier to satisfy.' She then provides a strong history of the human desire to see things forbidden, whether by hiding in the dark to see people, events, and passions meant to remain secret, or by using the instrument that made these urges possible - the development of the camera and its early uses in the Civil War to the present. 'The exhibition examines five areas of voyeuristic photography: street photography; the sexually explicit (or implicit) pictures we normally associate with voyeurism; celebrity stalking; photographs of death and violence; and surveillance in its many forms.
What follows then are images from a wide variety of photographers (many well known) of poverty and child labor and street living of the homeless, old and new images of a sexual nature that include deviant behavior, private personal moments (Nan Goldin's famous 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency' is excerpted), images burned in our minds of the shooting of JFK and Bobby Kennedy, the famous Marilyn Monroe icon by WeeGee, the Queen of England out with her Corgies, images of horror in lynchings, beatings, murders, firing squads, electrocutions, the famous Eddie Adams photo of 'Viet Cong Officer Executed 1968', war pictures, spy films from throughout the century, images of secret surveillance cameras and not so secret monitors that watch our every move in malls, and pictures of people such as the two terrifyingly disturbing Algerian women by Marc Granger. Pages and pages of a vast number of photographic images that once viewed cannot be forgotten fill this excellent volume.
The end of the book adds essays by Simon Baker ("Photography and the Surreptitious Image'), Philip Brookman ('Street Photography and the Theater of Life'), Carol Squiers ('Original Sin: The Birth of the Paparazzo'), Richard B. Woodward ('Dare to be Famous: Self-Exploitation'), and Marta Gili ('From Observation to Surveillance'). There is much to learn frrm this collection of images and essays - more information about our current obsession with the internet and cellphone cameras etc than we even imagine. It is a brilliant exhibition and an equally brilliant book.
Grady Harp
EXPOSED: VOYEURISM, SURVEILLANCE, AND THE CAMERA SINCE 1870 is the official catalogue for a massive photography exhibition created with the collaboration of the Tate Modern where it is now on exhibit in London and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art where it opens in October of this year, moving on to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in the spring of 2011. It is an ingenious concept for an exhibition curated by Sandra S. Phillips of SFMOMA who also contributes the fine essay LOOKING OUT, LOOKING IN: VOYEURISM AND ITS AFFINITIES FROM THE BEGINNING OF PHOTOGRAPHY that opens this well-designed sophisticated catalogue/art book.
Phillips begins her examination of the subject 'We cannot blame the camera for what it has done to us; nevertheless, it has made certain human predilections much easier to satisfy.' She then provides a strong history of the human desire to see things forbidden, whether by hiding in the dark to see people, events, and passions meant to remain secret, or by using the instrument that made these urges possible - the development of the camera and its early uses in the Civil War to the present. 'The exhibition examines five areas of voyeuristic photography: street photography; the sexually explicit (or implicit) pictures we normally associate with voyeurism; celebrity stalking; photographs of death and violence; and surveillance in its many forms.
What follows then are images from a wide variety of photographers (many well known) of poverty and child labor and street living of the homeless, old and new images of a sexual nature that include deviant behavior, private personal moments (Nan Goldin's famous 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency' is excerpted), images burned in our minds of the shooting of JFK and Bobby Kennedy, the famous Marilyn Monroe icon by WeeGee, the Queen of England out with her Corgies, images of horror in lynchings, beatings, murders, firing squads, electrocutions, the famous Eddie Adams photo of 'Viet Cong Officer Executed 1968', war pictures, spy films from throughout the century, images of secret surveillance cameras and not so secret monitors that watch our every move in malls, and pictures of people such as the two terrifyingly disturbing Algerian women by Marc Granger. Pages and pages of a vast number of photographic images that once viewed cannot be forgotten fill this excellent volume.
The end of the book adds essays by Simon Baker ("Photography and the Surreptitious Image'), Philip Brookman ('Street Photography and the Theater of Life'), Carol Squiers ('Original Sin: The Birth of the Paparazzo'), Richard B. Woodward ('Dare to be Famous: Self-Exploitation'), and Marta Gili ('From Observation to Surveillance'). There is much to learn frrm this collection of images and essays - more information about our current obsession with the internet and cellphone cameras etc than we even imagine. It is a brilliant exhibition and an equally brilliant book.
Grady Harp
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review