Here's Looking At You

Exposed: Voyerism, surveillance and the Camera - Tate Modern, London.  We managed to catch this exhibition in it's last week.  I'm so glad we made it. Exposed offered a fascinating look at photographs made on the sly, without the explicit permission of the people depicted. With photographs from the late nineteenth century to present day, the photographs presented a shocking, illuminating perspective on iconic and taboo subjects.

Entering the first room of the exhibition we were met with enlarged shots from Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s series Heads. The images were taken from great distance when pedestrians in New York unwittingly tripped automatic lights diCorcia rigged on the side-walk. The text accompanying the photos told you that one of the artist’s subjects took legal action against him, with the court eventually ruling in diCorcia’s favour. In the rest of the “Unseen Photographer” section it had images taken through buttonhole cameras.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia - Heads

By sequencing “Celebrity & the Public Gaze” as the next section, the curators ask visitors to consider whether the rules are – or should be – different for the famous. On one wall there were several of Ron Galella’s photos of Jackie Kennedy, one (“What makes Jackie Run?”) in which she is actively fleeing the photographer. On an adjoining wall Marilyn Monroe’s dress billows as she poses atop an air vent. There was a vibrant candid shot of Jack Nicholson also; which dominated one wall showing him swinging a golf club at the car of a driver who had just cut him off.

The next two sections of the exhibition were the most challenging: sex & death which contained journalistic images of death and violence some awful images of suicide, execution and lynching. It included images such as Tom Howard's electrocution of Ruth Snyder, from 1928, and Eddie Adams' haunting photograph of a Viet Cong officer being executed in 1968.

The final section, “Surveillance,” was perhaps the weakest.  These were largely pictures taken automatically, or single frames from an automated recording; simply in terms of composition, colouration and focus, you can tell that there is no human interest in their production. As a result I felt detachment from these last photographs where the majority of what had preceded had engaged me.

My favourite piece of the exhibition would have to of been by the photographer Shizuka Yokomizo who sent letters to strangers asking them to stand alone in their living rooms for a specified ten minute period of time when she would photograph them from outside.

Shizuka Yokomizo - Stranger

The most disturbing piece was Kohei Yoshiyuki's 1971 series,  it was originally shown in Japan: in a dark room where visitors had to use torches. However, for this exhibition it was shown in a dark hallway. The images were taken at night with an infrared camera and show straight couples having sex in Tokyo parks and gay men cruising for sex – all the time surrounded by others looking on, gawping.  My original thought was - "Only in Japan", I'm sure others will agree.

Throughout the exhibition I sensed a lack of interest in narrative. The images on display were taken quickly or secretly (or both), with the aim being to capture a single, true moment. The act of doing this removes that moment from its context and allows viewers to wrap their own story around it. Every invasion of privacy with which we were confronted with is simultaneously an invasion of our privacy and our invasion of someone else’s.