Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870 began by turning a spotlight on its viewers. A robotic beam shone from above, following its subjects across the first floor atrium of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) through a series of improvised tests: small circles, long strides. Its operators were invisible because they were absent. Anonymous spectators selected targets remotely using their own computers and a streaming feed. ACCESS (2003) by Marie Sester turned the museum’s most open space into an eerily gentle panopticon: a place where one feels watched but cannot confirm the feeling or identify the watchers. Though the light caused participants to modify their behavior, it was a playful force rather than a reforming or threatening one. Children ran to catch it and keep its attention. Many visitors walked by without noticing. In a semantic reversal, those competing to select a target on the “AccessClient” interface were called “viewers,” while the people they pursued were named “actors.” Though viewers were ostensibly the ones in control, as one of several using the interface, my choices were often quashed by the quicker clicks of others or by the auto-selection of the system itself. These inversions point to a central concern of Exposed, which in each of its five sections asked viewers to navigate both the agency and powerlessness of watching and being watched.

Voyeurism is commonly thought to be parasitic, passive: the consumption of another’s activity for one’s own erotic pleasure. The exhibition wall text framed it more generously as “an eagerness to see a subject commonly considered taboo.” Surveillance, on the other hand, implies activity, seeking out a potential threat in order to enable and justify the use of preemptive force, or to seek redress or retribution. Both words suggest that the looker is in a position of power, seeing but unseen. But as indicated by ACCESS, the activities of looking and being looked at embroil both parties in a complex and shifting dynamic, which many of the participating artists manipulated.

A sign that prefaced the exhibition’s main galleries on the fourth floor advised adults to preview it before allowing children to enter. The disclaimer pointed to a belief that images are agents capable of causing harm, and signaled the friction between electing to look at a photograph and being subjected to its content. In the room immediately following, titled “The Unseen Photographer,” the tools for shooting were on display: spy and surveillance technology that ranged from nineteenth-century cameras concealed in a shoe heel or vest pocket to a 2005 Motorola camera phone. These objects placed an emphasis on image production; they do not enhance sight, but enable users to record a version of what they see. They also served to historicize invasive photography as a medium, to romanticize its roots, and to connect it to the current moment, in which its role is increasingly complex. The progression from hidden contraptions to smaller yet more visible and popular devices created a visual argument: the technologies that facilitate surreptitious photography are not solely responsible for the abrasion of privacy they effect. Rather, their prevalence signals an ever-growing desire to capture images of others. On the walls of this room were pictures social documentarians created with the help of some of the first concealed devices. Images by Paul Strand, Henri Cartier Bresson, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn are unbelievably candid for their closeness. Strand used a false lens that enabled him to shoot to the side while appearing to aim straight ahead. The result is a haunting series in which his subjects stare directly through the camera; they think they are the ones watching.

Contemporary photographers employ a similar switch structurally, interrogating a power system that involves not only the people pictured in their photographs but also those who look at them. For Chris Verene’s Camera Club series (ca. 1996), included in the section “Voyeurism and Desire,” the artist joined a photography group that promised aspiring female models a dubious career break in exchange for posing naked. During shoots, Verene stood behind other camera-wielding men, who obscure the models in his images. His photographs allow the amateur photographers to retain the power of their anonymity, never offering a view of their faces. The models are also illegible, out of focus and partially blocked. By offering no information about the identities of the models or voyeurs, Verene both depicts and creates a shifting system of subjects and objects in which current viewers play a role: the images bait viewers’ voyeuristic impulses, while frustrating their capacity to pass judgment.

By documenting actual exchanges and events but refusing to make an enforceable claim about the people taking part, Verene’s images are representative of contemporary photography’s ambivalent relationship to truth telling. Exposed reproduced this ambivalence by undermining and reestablishing photography’s connection to truth. In Alison Jackson’s large format print, The Queen Plays with her Corgies (2007), an apparent Elizabeth II is glimpsed from behind, standing in Wellingtons alongside an ornately costumed guard who offers her purebreds a deflated soccer ball. The shot appears swift and candid, edged on each side by dark, blurred obstructions that keep the photographer from catching a full frame. Jackson’s Confidential series (2007) was exhibited next to snapshots taken by the first paparazzi in the 1950s and 1960s, part of a section themed “Celebrity and the Public Gaze.” But her images are entirely, even elaborately staged, and their presence suggested that the “real” ones on either side might be equally artificial.

The inclusion of unreliable images like Jackson’s indicated photography’s eroding documentary value, while reestablishing its importance as a means of understanding current conditions. Exposed proposed that photography’s relationship to reality is changing, becoming less about showing and more about making. It pointed to a definition of truth other than revelation and exposé—one in which social relations become real when they are imagined, even before they are enacted. The social imagination is not inherently benevolent, as the documents in “Witnessing Violence” attested. This section immediately followed the one on celebrity, and contained explicit press images of murders, suicides, and notorious moments in history. Records ranged in time and context from the American Civil War to the Rwandan genocide. They included the assassinations of John F. Kennedy photographed from a distance in 1963, and of a Viet Cong Officer shot and pictured at close range in 1968. In Johannesburg, South Africa—On the Edge (1975), a South African man named Amos Gexella is portrayed intimately from above with a crowd gathered in the street below. He turns to face the camera before ending his life by jumping six floors to the pavement. A caption typed on the side of the image indicates that he was urged to jump by spectators’ chants. Beyond bearing witness to a death, the photograph attests to the influence of witnessing, and to the potential violence implicit in being a bystander. The situation it depicts was altered by the simple fact that it was being watched.

“Surveillance,” the last section of the exhibition, continued to investigate how persistent looking impacts its subjects, but also explored the ways in which a narrative pieced together from observed facts might wander into invention. Surveillance, it suggested, is not only administered by governments and corporations in order to gather manipulable information, but also conducted by individuals for the purpose of building fictions whose uses are undefined and whose potential is unknown. For her series The Hotel (1981–83), Sophie Calle took a job as a hotel housekeeper in Venice. She documented items left in the rooms, and used them as clues to build written narratives about the lives of absent guests. In the process of examining the material possessions of the man in Room 25—reading his journal in which he describes every meal and examining the orange peels in his trash bin—she develops an emotional attachment to the parafictional character she monitors and creates. When she accidentally glimpses the man as he enters the room, she pledges to herself that she will try to forget, favoring the identity she fabricated. Trevor Paglen, also included in this section, induces narrative production by undermining the expectation that surveillance technology will produce a legible image. He inverts its purpose and direction, using it against powerful and seemingly inaccessible regimes. His image Chemical and Biological Weapons Proving Ground/Dugway, UT/Distance ~42 miles/10:51 a.m., 2006 (2006) documents what it names. But shot from such a distance and printed at a large scale, the highly charged test site becomes an abstraction: horizontal planes of dim color, freckled at a possible horizon line. By reducing the amount of information provided by the image, Paglen creates a space for both fantasy and paranoia.

Though photographic images are riddled with potential points of manipulation—in their production, as in Jackson’s staged photographs; in their reception, as in Verene’s Camera Club series; through direct if unintended intervention, as in the AP’s documentation of Gexella’s suicide—ultimately the exhibition suggests that photographs are not only truth-tellers but also mechanisms used to construct truths. This capacity can be put to productive and destructive ends as individuals wrestle for the right to see and be seen, and struggle to hold onto privacy. As public space more closely resembles a panopticon, private decisions are increasingly nudged by a sense of constant supervision. The ability to produce metaphors out of the real stuff of photographs is a hopeful sign of agency, demonstrated in an exhibition that frequently undermines any stable notion of the term. While their ability to impartially record events is called into question, photographs are becoming tools for making what Nietzsche called “life-preserving fictions,”¹ metaphors that enable the public imagination, if by ever more invasive means.