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Harry Callahan’s Atlanta (1984)
Oct 30: Voyeurism at the SFMoMA
October 2010
Whether it’s security-camera footage of a robbery in progress,
cell-phone shots of a protest march, or paparazzi snaps of stars
off-duty, surveillance images are so commonplace they’ve become the
wallpaper of modern life. It’s easy, then, to overlook the genre’s rich
history and what the prevalence of such pictures says about who we are.
A new exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—“Exposed:
Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera Since 1870” (October 30 to April
17, 2011)—offers a few insights. From Walker Evans’s glimpses of subway
riders, shot discreetly with a small camera, to photos of the war in
Iraq, taken using night-vision goggles, “Exposed” draws on hundreds of
pictures to tell the story of what curator Sandra S. Phillips calls
“invasive looking.” Seen together, the images blur the lines between
subject, viewer, and voyeur. “I wanted to bring people back to an
understanding about borders and the whole notion of privacy,” says
Phillips, who adds that, for all its breadth, the show is but a “first
crack at this enormous subject.”
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