EXPOSED: VOYEURISM, SURVEILLANCE AND THE CAMERA: THE TATE MODERN

EXPOSED: VOYEURISM, SURVEILLANCE AND THE CAMERA: THE TATE MODERN,August 2010

 Exposed is a contrasting mess of disparate effects combined with some coherent strands, a formula the Tate Modern seems to be now quite adept at. The exhibition wants to ask the central question: is intrusion inherent to camera technology? It does this with reference to examples from both private and public life. Voyeurism is examined as a celebration of prying, then as a kind of dirty yet enjoyable perversion, then as something lurid leading to its eventual criminalisation (2003 in the UK). 

The exhibition examines celebrities and celebrity culture. The exhibition makes us ponder over the celebrities contradictory need for the oxygen of publicity versus the needs of a private life with reference to images of Taylor and Burton enjoying some intimate, yet public moments; Kim Novak sitting down in a train's diner compartment, all the men's eyes suddenly turn to the right; Jack Nicholson in an ill-advised moment of road rage; the Queen with her corgis and some guys in 18th century costume. There's a snap of Paris Hilton being returned to gaol. The image is emotionally plausible, yet Paris Hilton seems a consciously created celebrity bubble that has burst. 

The word surveillance, like voyeurism, is of French origin, so it’s unsurprising to find that the root of some of the techniques of voyeurism and pornography date back to the French Impressionists. The techniques of surveillance were foreshadowed by the Impressionists. Auguste Belloc (1800 - 1867), for instance, an apparently by no means failed painter and photographer, began to produce images of women with their skirts around their heads and their legs spread under the nom de plume Billon. His activities soon brought him to the attention of the police. In another revealing image Edgar Degas is observed leaving a pissoir, thus maintaining celebrity’s connection with olfactory smells and bodily functions. French Impressionists were extending the possibilities of perversion. Indeed they were coming up with some new and surprising perversions to add to the already burgeoning list of possible perversions established in the 18th century. 

Voyeurism is obviously not just an instrument of titillation, but also of control. The first surveillance device may indeed have been Jeremy Bentham's panopticon designed in 1785. The device allowed the viewer to observe prison inmates without being observed in return. The earliest usages of surveillance are from this country: the suffragettes, for instance, were photographed by the police who also possessed detailed descriptions of them alongside a list of their offences. These techniques would later be used against “terrorist” organisations such as the IRA or the Baader Meinhof gang. The evolution of surveillance techniques often seem to precede a change in society that makes the original offence, in this case votes for women, an offence no longer. 

 

So much of the exhibition is oddly retrospective, or somehow debating its very own retrospectivity. The Zabruder film of the Kennedy assassination, which might be regarded as a kind of watershed in surveillance, is also mentioned. However there’s no detailed account of how Zabruder's home movie altered contemporary views of the assassination, but also re-opened the case when the film was first viewed by the public after it was initially banned. There's no mention either of its re-use in Oliver Stone's film JFK, but films like Hitchcock's Rear Window are referenced which is itself a film about obsessive voyeurism (scopophilia). The exhibition doesn’t always do enough to connect up the strands of painting, photography and cinema. 

Public photography relies on the proliferation and cheapening of camera technology through early cameras to the introduction of the first noisy flash photography to the modern iphone complete with camera and movie-making technology. Some of the photographers, mostly working in America, that are mentioned include: Lee Friedlander (1934 - ), Garry Winogrand (1928 -1984), Robert Frank (1924 - ) and Harry Callahan (1912 - 1999). Their subjects are anonymous photography of urban scenes and their inhabitants. These photographers encapsulate the urge to document but also to capture ordinary people in candid moments, not so much subjects as victims. 

The exhibition is an account of the evolution of American amateur photography in contrast to American state surveillance and military photography. Military surveillance seems to have been begun by the British during the Crimean War and British colonialist involvement in China during the Boxer rising. During the American Civil War (1860 - 1865) corpses were re-arranged into romantic poses for the newspaper reading public, an early example of the realisation of the impact of war journalism on public opinion. Of course, graphic depictions of the fighting may have been regarded as too disturbing for the general public of that era. They are also hardly an attractive recruiting poster. Memorable events such as the execution of President Abraham Lincoln's assassins are also recorded for public and posterity. The public record is now just that. After the ACW amateur photography took off in the USA. Amateur photographers begin to evolve methods of taking snaps without their subject’s knowledge, tactics later adopted by photo-journalists: cameras are placed into walking sticks, watches, the heels of shoes: the camera can be absolutely anywhere, sometimes in the most ordinary, everyday of places. Watching and being watched is intrusive, disturbing, yet simultaneously pleasurable, the exhibition implies, aspects of human nature perhaps, or human behaviour, that are dealt with in a seemingly quite neutral, non-judgemental way, yet a framing moral judgement is often intrinsic to the exhibition's working. 

The exhibition imitates the Kinsey report, which it also references, attempting to describe the functions of titillation while becoming titillating in its own way. In laugh out loud images subjects are captured in the full flow of coitus or coupling gratuitously in cinemas, cars, on beaches or roads. In fact, just about anywhere. Military involvement in surveillance continued on through WW1 and WW2, being especially useful in 1918, when Allied tactics advanced significantly, in 1944 during the Normandy landings and in documenting Nazi atrocities at the end of WW2. It was not until the Vietnam War that we see the mass media bring the war to the American living room with disastrous consequences for the politicians and the generals. Since the war is now summarised for the American public by images of a napalmed Vietnamese girl in agony running down a road, the execution of a possible Viet Cong sympathiser by a South Vietnamese chief of police or tax collector. These images became negative propaganda for the US government and turned public opinion against the war. During the two Gulf wars access to the warfront was carefully controlled by the military leading philosopher Jean Baudrillard to claim that the first Gulf war did not exist, being the first virtual war in history. A new kind of war is conceived meaning new vocabulary built on euphemisms redolent of Orwell: 'smart' technologies, 'precision' bombing, 'collateral damage' (indiscriminate killing of civilians), WMDs in the wake of the symmetrical attacks of 9:11 assymetrical means are being employed to counteract "terror". 

The exhibition touches on most sites of Cold War and post-Cold War conflict: Kuwait, Northern Ireland, Germany, the World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland, CCTV footage of shopping malls, recorded footage of stings, set ups, framings, the proliferation of infra-red and militarised camera technologies. But also private, intimate spheres such as Kohei Yoshiyaki's 1946 infra-red photographic study The Park. Romantic couplings in Tokyo's parks are being observed by voyeurs who are in turn being observed by cameramen, who are in turn being observed by us, the audience. It’s easy to be disgusted or amazed by the activities of these voyeurs until we reflect (somewhat ironically) that we too are implicated. The Tate Modern's new exhibition requires a sophisticated response, since it refuses art movement aesthetics or canonical aesthetics, so that none of the photographs are in any way 'good'. In fact they even veer away from tastefulness yet lots of ultimately hilarious and simultaneously revealing images are offered up to us. 

 Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, London, August 2010