Are you being watched?
Most likely. Surveillance, especially by camera, is a fact of modern life.
A strange new exhibit, opening Saturday at Walker Art Center, examines some of the darker psychological angles of camera culture as it has evolved over the past 140 years, though it is disappointingly mum on hot-button contemporary situations. Its premise is that voyeurism is now, and always has been, the essence of photography.
Called "Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870," the show features about 150 mostly black-and-white images, including news and documentary pictures; paparazzi shots of celebrities; sex and bondage photos, and images from spy and security cameras.
Organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the show leaves viewers to draw their own conclusions about what curator Sandra S. Phillips calls the "amoral allure" of violence.
The Walker's installation is loosely arranged in five thematic sections. The first, "The Unseen Photographer," includes images taken anonymously or on the sly. Some are intended to arouse sympathy, like Dorothea Lange's 1933 "White Angel Breadline, San Francisco," depicting a destitute man in an almost prayerful pose.
"Voyeurism and Desire" offers a predictably kinky selection of bondage pictures, historic prostitute and transvestite imagery, and contemporary Peeping Tom photos of sex acts. The third section, "Celebrity and the Public Gaze," proves that even famous people once shunned the camera. Greta Garbo glowers and Jackie flees.
Not surprisingly, "Witnessing Violence" is a harrowing section of mutilated bodies, assassinations, executions, lynchings and Vietnam. Some of the 20th century's most infamous photos are here, including two Pulitzer Prize winners: Eddie Adams' 1968 picture of a South Vietnamese general executing a Viet Cong infiltrator, and Nick Ut's 1972 picture of terrified Vietnamese children fleeing a napalm bombing. Explanatory labels contextualize some pictures, but most are left hanging.
