Exposed Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera Tate Modern: Exhibition 28 May – 3 October 2010
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Exposed Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera Tate Modern: Exhibition 28 May – 3 October 2010 Exposed offers a fascinating look at pictures made on the sly, without the explicit permission of the people depicted. With photographs from the late nineteenth century to present day, the pictures present a shocking, illuminating and witty perspective on iconic and taboo subjects. Beginning with the idea of the ‘unseen photographer’, Exposed presents 250 works by celebrated artists and photographers including Brassaï’s erotic Secret Paris of the 1930s images; Weegee’s iconic photograph of Marilyn Monroe; and Nick Ut’s reportage image of children escaping napalm attacks in the Vietnam War. Sex and celebrity is an important part of the exhibition, presenting photographs of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, Paris Hilton on her way to prison and the assassination of JFK. Other renowned photographers represented in the show include Guy Bourdin, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Philip Lorca diCorcia, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Lee Miller, Helmut Newton and Man Ray. The UK is now the most surveyed country in the world. We have an obsession with voyeurism, privacy laws, freedom of media, and surveillance – images captured and relayed on camera phones, YouTube or reality TV. Much of Exposed focuses on surveillance, including works by both amateur and press photographers, and images produced using automatic technology such asCCTV. The issues raised are particularly relevant in the current climate, with topical debates raging around the rights and desires of individuals, terrorism and the increasing availability and use of surveillance. Exposed confronts these issues and their implications head-on. 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, andSurveillance. 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. The Unseen Photographer The first section of the exhibition considers ways in which photography can reveal the world unawares and show people caught with their guard down. This idea begins with the technologies that have allowed images to be made surreptitiously, from nineteenth-century cameras hidden in walking sticks, shoes or inside suit- jackets, to twentieth-century devices such as the lateral view-finder which allows the photographer to apparently face one direction while taking a picture in another. Harry Callahan Atlanta 1984 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art © Estate of Harry Callahan Room 1 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’sSubway 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 2 The 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 3 This 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. Men's shoes with camera hidden in heel © National Museum of American History Photographic History, gift of The New York News Celebrity and the Public Gaze Weegee (Arthur Fellig) Marilyn Monroe c1950s © Weegee / International Center of Photography / Getty Images The notion of celebrity as we know it today is inseparable from the invention of photography. By the 1860s, photographic studio portraits allowed notable figures to become instantly recognisable to the public. However, this period of controlled self-publicity was short-lived. Smaller, more portable cameras allowed for covert picture-taking during private moments, and faster shutter speeds opened up opportunities for capturing subjects off-guard. Whilst some famous figures have manipulated the medium to their advantage, the infringement of privacy represented by such photographs remains controversial. Room 4 As far back as the early 1880s, Italian photographer Giuseppe Primoli was taking impromptu snapshots of the rich and famous in embarrassing situations, such as artist Edgar Degas leaving a pissoir. One of the earliest figures to deliberately exploit the potential of the camera to construct a celebrity persona was the Countess of Castiglione, a Florentine noblewoman and courtesan. Aided by photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson, the Countess devised elaborate private fantasies to enact in front of the camera. Some more recent icons have been less willing to invite the photographer’s gaze. His intrusive photographs of Jackie Kennedy made Ron Galella one of the most notorious paparazzi, devoted to the candid image- taking of celebrities for publication in the press. The Italian word derives from ‘Paparazzo’ a fictional news photographer in Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita, whose real world equivalents, such as Tazio Secchiaroli and Marcello Geppetti, were famed for their relentless pursuit of film stars and other celebrities. The angry reactions of their targets are obvious from their hounded expressions and violent outbursts. Contemporary photographer Alison Jackson has exploited the comic potential of this genre through her staged photographs of celebrity lookalikes. Jackson takes the candid picture to an extreme, picturing her ‘celebrities’ in their most intimate moments. Voyeurism and Desire Weegee (Arthur Fellig) Audience in the Palace Theater c1943 © Weegee / International Center of Photography / Getty Images Sexual or erotic images have been made throughout the history of photography. This section includes photographs that gaze openly at willing subjects as well as those depicting illicit and intimate acts made without the knowledge or permission of their subjects. Many of these images seem to position the viewer in the role of a ‘peeping tom’. At the same time, they pose difficult questions about who was looking and why, when the picture was made, and whether we should collude with, or reject, this point of view. Room 5 The fine line between art and eroticism was already present in the 1850s. Louis-Camille D’Olivier’s photographs of female nudes were intended as exemplary images for art students to draw from, but they soon acquired a secondary value as images of erotic contemplation for their mostly male audience. In the twentieth century, this ambiguity was particularly associated with fashion photography, exemplified here by the work of Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton. Newton’s Self-Portrait with Wife June and Models offers a master-class in fetishistic looking, complicating the play of gazes by a complex interior space within which his wife June occupies a prominent position. In contrast to Newton’s polished images, the photographs of Miroslav Tichý preserve the frisson of their production through their grainy, home-made feel. An eccentric, marginal figure, Tichý stalked the streets and swimming baths of his home town in provincial Czechoslovakia with hand-made cameras that none of the local people believed were real. The results surprised and stunned their subjects when they were shown many years later, offering an unnerving and strangely poetic record of a life on the outskirts of society. Room 6 The French pioneers of photography often supplemented their income by producing pornographic pictures printed on small stereo cards, which appeared as three-dimensional when viewed correctly.