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August 24, 2010
The Tate Modern has an exhibition entitled Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. It refers to the different ways that the camera has been used to make images surreptitiously and satisfy the desire to see what is hidden.
If the unwieldy nature of early photographic equipment made it very difficult to capture people unawares, then the classic Leica (film camera) made it easy:
Harry Callahan, Atlanta 1984
The Callahan image is in the first section of the exhibition, which considers ways in which photography can reveal the world unawares and show people caught with their guard down.
Susan Sontag saidi n her 1977 book On Photography:
‘there is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera’, one which ‘may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate – all activities that … can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.’
Photography is a licence to spy and pry, to transgress, shock, provoke and, above all, to invade the privacy of others. It is an unspoken question that permeates the history of photography, but has received very little critical discussion.
Today, photography itself could be said to be under siege despite the emergence of our surveillance culture in which security cameras silently monitor from a distance individuals, groups, entire cities.
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