Fires, accidents, wars, corpses, implicit sex, explicit sex — it sounds like an exhibition of contemporary art, but in the case of Tate Modern’s new show, Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera, that’s debatable. More than 250 photographs and films of celebrities, and ordinary people doing ordinary, or more often, extraordinary things, when they thought they were unobserved, play provocatively with the idea of the forbidden gaze. Spanning the 1850s to today, it’s like a history of the photographic invasion of privacy.
It is a good subject for an exhibition, of course, because much of this is mass-consumption, tabloid material, shown with a tabloid’s repetitiveness, hard stare and raunchy intimacy. We may deny drooling over the tabloids, but this exhibition fastens tenaciously on to the common, involuntary fascinations, and we stare raptly at the results. It is no use telling children, or adults for that matter, to look away from sex or violence, our eyes will simply wander back.
It is also a good opportunity to haul in works by an impressive list of practitioners, among them Brassaï, Guy Bourdin, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Philip- Lorca diCorcia, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Dorothea Lange, Lee Miller, Helmut Newton, Paul Strand, Garry Winogrand and Weegee, as well as amateur and less well-known photographers.
Brassaï, for example, the Hungarian-born nocturnal wanderer of the streets of Paris, made memorable snatched photographs of bare-breasted dancers, tramps, street cleaners and women in ballgowns, the ribald low life and high life of 1920s and 1930s Paris. In the late 1930s Walker Evans used a concealed camera on the New York subway to catch strangers unaware, their guards down and their faces naked. But theirs were not the earliest examples of voyeuristic invasions of privacy. In the 1890s Jacob Riis, a crusading New York reporter who used photography to promote his fight to clear the slums, used to burst into the crowded and grimy lodgings of the destitute in the middle of the night and photograph them in their dark, cluttered, raw poverty.
It is said that women fainted when Riis showed his pictures. It is hard to imagine them having that impact today; yet the work of the Magnum photojournalist Susan Meiselas is harder hitting than most. One well-known image, taken at Cuesta del Plomo, shows a headless spine stripped to the bone and the upper legs of a corpse lying in a beautiful Nicaraguan landscape. It has to be one of the more challenging items on offer. But her series Carnival Strippers, in which she shoots the faces of salivating men watching women displaying themselves, is surely influenced by the work of Weegee, one of the most infamous voyeuristic tabloid photographers and the man to whom this whole show might have been dedicated.
Weegee, the mid-20th-century American crime photographer, was obsessed with voyeurism. Many have photographed horror, crime, sex and their emotional repercussions, but none so devotedly, so assiduously as Weegee. Through his camera lens, the messy tears, hysteria and insecure moments of his generation were hung out to dry with unsparing enthusiasm. He went out night after night stalking disaster and sex, and his prying eyes usually found it, then delivered it in heavily cropped, extreme high-contrast compositions to his delighted news editor.
Most of Weegee’s pictures were stolen, obtained surreptitiously or snatched on the run — darkness was no protection. Thirty years later, in Japan, a photographer named Kohei Yoshiyuki spent months at night with a crowd of voyeuristic men who regularly gathered in a Tokyo park to watch — and touch — couples making love. He finally recorded the lot of them — both love-making couples and pawing men — with an infrared camera.
Yoshiyuki was clearly happily dedicated to his subject, and so one imagines were the paparazzi featured here, who made a profession of tracking and recording the inappropriate or private behaviour of the (mostly historically) famous — Jackie Kennedy, Anita Ekberg, Greta Garbo as well as Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, caught in an act which they must have assumed was unobserved.
The curators have not stinted on covert shots of the private behaviour of the anonymous either. There are explicit photographs of sex workers in action with their clients, taken by Merry Alpern from a hideout across the street, and we see Robert Mapplethorpe’s picures of fetishistic dress and sexual acts.
Incongruously after all this exhaustive titillation, the large (four rooms) final section of this show is devoted to surveillance photography and its technology. Pictures of watch towers in Northern Ireland, of German surveillance look-out points and pictures of the webs of wires that enable governments to pick up mobile phone conversations are interesting but something of a dry biscuit after the gluttonous feast of voyeurism that you have just consumed. With its heavily implicit political undercurrents, this section should really have been turned into a separate exhibition altogether.
This is a huge show — far too long-winded to be gripping — but the big questions remain: does all this count as art and is it worthy of the Tate? Most of the photographs were not made with art or galleries remotely in mind. Hundreds of the historical photographs were shot as news. Many of the contemporary works would sit comfortably in the tabloids or in magazines such as Heat. And yet here we find them presented in large format, on glossy paper, tastefully framed and handsomely hung. It is the tabloid as high art.
Today we have to accept these photographs as works of art because they reflect our culture. Invasive, vulgar and outrageous pictures are published daily in glossy celebrity magazines, and a mass audience responds with joy and subscriptions. In an era of mass proliferation of images, they appear all over the internet. They are downloaded on mobile phones and in music videos.
Powerful art comes from powerful popular culture, and, like it or not, these photographs have power. They tell us a great deal about ourselves. Some will be troubled, others will be elated to be privy to the rude exposures you will find here. But those who are repelled may nevertheless be vaguely aware of a nagging need in themselves to have a good look too. Tate Modern has seen the enemy, and it is us.
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