Geoffrey Batchen: Guilty Pleasures
Photography was conceived around 1800, at about the same time then as Jeremy Bentham’s
panopticon.1 This, and the photograph’s rapid incorporation into modernity’s disciplinary
apparatus, has led a number of scholars to examine how “photography served to introduce the
panopticon into daily life.” 2 It’s certainly true that, even before the invention of photography was
announced in 1839, there were suggestions that a room-sized camera obscura be erected in
Glasgow for the permanent surveillance of the passing population. “By this means, the necessity
of sending out emissaries to reconnoiter the conduct of the lieges would be superseded, since
everything would then take place, as it were, under the eye of the Police.”3 Now, of course, we
are constantly being surveyed by cameras that fulfill this very same function, creating, as Michel
Foucault described, “a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic
functioning of power.”4 So it’s fair to say that a panoptic principle has always been inscribed at
the very heart of photography’s operation in our culture.
But so has another aspect of surveillance, the desire to see without being seen. This kind
of desire, automatically identified with sexual voyeurism and therefore with perversion, is for the
same reason usually assumed to belong only at the margins of modern social activity.5 However a
brief survey of photography’s history reveals that this particular guilty pleasure has always been
right there at the center of the medium, motivating a significant and surprisingly varied body of
surveillance-type images.
The English inventor of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot, was, for example, in
the habit of leaving his small camera obscura lying around the grounds of his estate to allow for
the long exposure times necessary to his photogenic drawings. This detached prosthesis of his
own eye would record the outlines of his house, but also anything else that might venture into its
field of vision and hang around long enough (in one instance, in 1842, this included himself,
standing by a door). His wife Constance once called such cameras “mousetrap,” a nickname that
points to their small size as well as their hidden, potentially dangerous capacities for capturing
things. Talbot’s French rival Louis Daguerre made similarly lengthy exposures from his studio
window, looking down onto the Boulevard du Temple to inadvertently record a boot-black and
his customer standing still on the street below. Hippolyte Bayard, another French pioneer, made
further examples of these sorts of photographs, showing fellow citizens going about their daily
lives completely unaware that they were being photographed. These three early practitioners
thereby initiated a photographic tradition of surreptitious street photography that continues to this
day.
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William Henry Fox Talbot: From the life, Goddard instructs Henneman and Porter, 8 April 1842
What are even more interesting, however, are those images made by early photographers
in which people are asked to pose as if they are unaware of the camera’s presence. In a tableau
vivant staged for Talbot’s camera on 17 August 1843, subjects pretend to take tea around a table
set up on the lawn outside his house, Lacock Abbey. All of them carefully avoid looking into the
camera, as if Talbot and ourselves (who now look through that camera’s eye) are invisible to
them, as if we are seeing them from the vantage point of a modern surveillance camera. Talbot
made numerous images of this sort, showing his family, friends, and servants playing chess,
sawing wood, making transactions, or engaged in conversation. This “acting between living
persons,” as John Herschel called it, borrowed its conventions from both a popular parlor game
and from history painting, and before that from carved sculptural friezes. The images that result
often retain this sense of two-dimensionality, with figures carefully displayed in shallow space for
a camera they are nevertheless strenuously pretending is not really there. In Talbot’s picture of
John Goddard speaking to two companions, taken on 8 April 1842, he even has one of the
listeners leaning forward over the back of a chair precariously balanced on only two legs, while
Goddard’s left hand has its fingers curled upward as if caught in mid-speech. These complex
poses had to be held for over a minute if the impression was to be left that this photograph was indeed taken, as Talbot put it, “from the life.” 6
This impression was even more diligently pursued in the 1840s by David Hill and Robert
Adamson in Edinburgh. The subjects of their many portraits almost never look directly at the
camera, assuming instead a casual demeanor that denies their careful staging and composition.
This “candid camera” aesthetic was maintained when the two Scotsmen took a series of calotype
pictures of the community living in the small fishing village of Newhaven in about 1845. The
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apparent naturalness of the poses and settings in these pictures, and in particular the illusion that
no one is aware of being photographed,
provides them with a sense of truth and objectivity that was obviously dear to the photographers
and, they assumed, to their prospective customers.7 It also helped to distinguish their portraits
from the formal, and formulaic, work of most commercial daguerreotype studios, in which
subjects were carefully arranged to appear more ideal in the picture than they were in reality.
So at what point, and why, did the “unposed” come to be equated with “life”? And under
what circumstances did seeing without being seen become a central trope of photographic image
making? I have elsewhere tried to show how the emergence of a desire to photograph in the early
nineteenth century was accompanied by a number of significant shifts in, for example,
subjectivity, time, and representation; shifts that were absolutely necessary to photography’s
conception but were also imbricated in the broader formation of modernity itself. One
consequence of these changes was a gradual loss of faith in the values and world-view of the
eighteenth century. Before photography, the ideal picture was associated with artifice and
calculation, as evidenced by the self-conscious reiteration of established conventions of beauty.
With the invention of our modern notions of history and time, reality becomes the new ideal, a
reality released from the cultured orchestration of the human hand. Romantic artists like John
Constable and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, sought to capture the contingent, the
momentary, and the unplanned in paint or words, as if to finally give nature its own head. Modern
life, “the life,” was signified by the clear separation of the dynamic present from a static past. At
the same moment, both Constable and Coleridge recognized that their very means of expression
had become a problem. Representation was no longer transparent to the thing being represented,
and neither was the human eye. What one saw was dependent on the conditions of seeing, on how
one saw, even on who was doing the seeing (and on the consciousness of both observer and
observed of that seeing). 8
There were two possible solutions to this problem. The artist could acknowledge that all
representation was a subjective artifice and make that fact a visible part of his or her expression,
allowing paint to become an overt presence on the surface of the canvas or treating words as
obdurate things to be manipulated and struggled with. The other solution was to replace the eye
with a reliable mechanical substitute (photography) and as much as possible erase any signs of
human mediation in the making of the image; in other words, to produce non-subjective images
that appear to let us see without being seen.
This second inclination, already signaled in Talbot’s tableaux and Hill and Adamson’s
candid portraits, was facilitated by the introduction of hand-held, rapid-exposure cameras in the
late nineteenth century, allowing surveillance imagery to become an important photographic
aesthetic. Such cameras were made practicable by the use of dry gelatin plates, first put on the
market in 1873, and with these faster, more sensitive plates also came the need for photographic
shutters. One of the first of the cameras that incorporated both was Thomas Solas’ so-called
“Detective” camera of 1881, and the name soon caught on, as did the secretive taking of photographs it implied. “The idea of a hidden camera, observing without being observed, appealed to a
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sense of curiosity and fit in well with the rise in detective and mystery fiction in the popular
literature of the day.”9 Indeed, the photographic journals were soon flooded with advertisements
for detective cameras designed to look like watches, books, parcels, cravats, buttons, purses, hats,
revolvers, and even walking sticks! Robinson & Sons, for example, promoted their “Secret
Camera” in The Amateur Photographer of 25 May 1888 with a woodcut illustration that showed
a circular camera apparatus worn behind a man’s coat, its lens poking through a button hole. It
could take six pictures at a time on a circular glass plate and required no focusing. Over 15,000 of
these kinds of concealed vest cameras were sold between 1886 and 1889, mostly to amateurs (but
also, apparently, to artists, journalists, and the police). According to the Philadelphia
Photographer of 16 October 1886, “It can do more mischief than its weight in dynamite, or more
good than its weight in gold, according to the disposition and will of the person who pulls the
string.”10
One of these persons was a Mr. Horace Engle, an amateur photographer living in
Pennsylvania. His 150 surviving images, each one and five-eighths inches in diameter, were made
with a Gray-Stirn Concealed Vest Camera, first patented in July 1886. They show the kinds of
compositions one might expect, such as a close view of four people going into a temperance
meeting, none of them looking at the camera and with the man on the right severely cropped.
Another view shows a Memorial Day parade in Indianapolis taken on May 30, 1888, with the
rows of marching soldiers heading straight for the hidden camera and thereby creating a deep
sense of spatial recession. The formal qualities of other pictures seem less dependent on this kind
of technology, for example a portrait of a fruit tree (although the spreading branches that fill the
circular framing create a strikingly abstract image).11
Some commentators were critical of the limited use to which such cameras were put.
“Among the many ‘detective’ and other instantaneous pictures one sees at the various exhibitions,
it is a little singular how very few there are of ‘street life’... very few indeed of work and every
day life as seen in the streets of our large towns.” 12 This couldn’t be said of the work of
Englishman Paul Martin. His camera of choice was Jonathan Fallowfield’s Facile Hand Camera,
designed to be wrapped in brown paper like a parcel (“Ease. Simplicity, and Pleasure, The
Cheapest and most Perfect yet offered. The Sensation of 1890, Unobtrusive Appearance”). With
this instrument under his arm Martin was able to take a series of “instantaneous” exposures of
ordinary British life, showing incidents such as carriage accidents or arrests as they happened but
also scenes of ordinary people enjoying the beach at Yarmouth or selling goods and services on
the street. He often used these photos as transparencies to illustrate anecdotal lectures on contemporary English life. His images show social life as a surface parade of incidental events and
interactions that are of interest in themselves, a genre of naturalism without any traditional artistic
or spiritual qualities. But they also demonstrate a new kind of erotic relationship to photographing
itself. “It is impossible to describe the thrill which taking the first snap without being noticed
gave one, and the relief at not being followed by urchins, who just as one is going to take a
photograph stand right in front shouting Take me, guv’nor’.”13
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Martin might also have been relieved not to be followed by the police. The invasive
nature of this kind of photography had quickly become an issue of concern. Contributors to the
Glasgow Herald of 1891 complained of “the disgraceful attitude of photographing anyone against
his will,” while the 1898 British Journal of Photography fulminated against “the hand-camera
fiends who ‘snap-shot’ ladies as they emerge from their morning dip at the seaside, or loving
couples quietly reading under a shady rock, or surreptitiously photograph private picnicking
parties and then show the results at lantern entertainments ... when they have been caught in the
act, their cameras have been forcibly emptied and themselves unceremoniously treated.” Permits
were soon required for photographing in public places like parks, with “persons and groups of
persons” explicitly excluded as potential photographic subjects. At least one photographer was
prosecuted and convicted for ignoring this restriction.14 It turned out that surveillance was the
prerogative of the state, not the individual.
In 1888, George Eastman of Rochester, New York, introduced the first Kodak camera, a
hand-held instrument loaded at his factory with a roll of paper coated with gelatino-bromide
emulsion allowing 100 circular exposures, each 2½ inches in diameter. With one product,
Eastman had transformed photography using methods of standardization, mass manufacture and
mass marketing that were to bring the medium into the hands of people in the millions. But he
also made a “detective” sensibility the bedrock of popular photography. One result was the
accelerated production of the amateur, mobile, informal and varied snapshot type image with
which we are all so familiar today. Although many snapshots retained the formal, centralized
compositions of commercial photography, they were also used to record those things once
thought to be too common to be worth recording: the momentary, the everyday, the banal, the
purely personal. Some amateurs naturally exploited the capacity of this smaller camera to catch a
photographic subject unawares and thus overthrow the perceived tyranny of the pose.15
So from about the turn of the twentieth century, all photographers had the technical means
at their disposal to take pictures unbeknownst to the subjects of those pictures. What’s interesting
then is how many serious practitioners deliberately avoid this possibility. In the pictures made in
this period by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine for example, both dedicated in their different ways to the
documentation of the living and working conditions of working class immigrants in New York
city, the subjects almost always look directly into the camera. It’s as if this overt acknowledgment
of the camera’s temporary presence in their lives will in some way compensate for its intrusion
(shortly to be followed by that of the state). But this kind of pose also helps combat the sense,
already well-established in the public mind, that hand-held cameras are synonymous with an
unwarranted surveillance. Hine’s portraits of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, which he began
taking with a small camera in 1905, set out to induce an empathy between them and us, both by
conjuring established visual rhetorics such as images of the Madonna and by providing a direct
exchange of our respective gazes, a shared humanity. At the same time, Hine establishes a set of
conventions for the “ethical” photograph, conventions that eschew the “bad habits” of detective
photography while retaining its claims to naturalism. There is no trickery here, his images say; no
one has been taken unawares or against their consent. People stand facing the camera, but they do
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not “pose,” and they are not being tricked or exploited. “The average person believes implicitly
that the photograph cannot falsify. Of course, you and I know that this unbounded faith in the
integrity of the photograph is often rudely shaken, for, while photographs may not lie, liars may
photograph. It becomes necessary, then, in our revelation of the truth, to see to it that the camera
we depend upon contracts no bad habits.”16
Although Hine was not employed by the Farm Security Administration to document the
effects of the Great Depression on America’s farming community in the 1930s, his notion of an
ethical photography remains a visible trace in the work of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and
the others who were so employed. Their subjects once again often look squarely into the camera,
a stance that speaks to a complicity between photographer and subject and a directness of contact
between us and them (we look at them, but they look out at us too).17 But this directness also
speaks of a photographic honesty necessary to the effective propagation of New Deal welfare
policies, the task to which these images were dedicated.
Walker Evans: From the series Subway Portrait, 1938-41
The subsequent celebration of this documentary tradition makes the personal images
made by Evans in the New York subway in 1938 and 1941 all the more striking. Sitting in
subway cars with a hidden Leica camera, Evans made a large series of pictures (“true portraiture”
he called it) of the faces of those sitting across from him; capturing them in that “special state”
when “the guard is down and the mask is off.”18 An odd claim really, for never is the guard so up
as when one is sitting opposite strangers on public transport. And it is this guarded blankness of
expression that Evans did indeed capture with his invasive camera on those darkened train rides, a
sameness of expression spanning class, gender and racial differences and that even now remains
impenetrable and opaque. One recent observer of these photographs claims that Evans
“unconsciously recorded the claustrophobia and anxiety of a nation caught between the
Depression and World War II.”19 Perhaps it is precisely these sorts of fanciful pop-psychology
projections that Evans hoped to induce from future viewers. But it seems from his own
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unpublished notes that he also hoped to invent a kind of photographic disinterestedness, a
combination of objective recording and surrealist play that is very distinct from documentary.
“Theorists claim almost everything for the camera except the negation that it can be made
not to think, and not to translate its operator’s emotion.... I would like to be able to state flatly that
sixty-two people came unconsciously into range before an impersonal fixed recording machine
during a certain time period, and that all those individuals who came into the film frame were
photographed, and photographed without any human selection for the moment of lens exposure. I
do claim that this series of pictures is the nearest to such a pure record that the tools and supplies
and the practical intelligence at my disposal could accomplish.”
“In America, people do not look at each other publicly much. The well bred consider it
staring, and therefore bad form. ... I remember my first experience as a cafe sitter in Europe.
There is staring that startles the American. I tried to analyze it and came out with the realization
that the European is really interested in just ordinary people and makes a study of man with his
eyes in public. What a pleasure and an art it was to study back. ... Stare. It is the way to educate
your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here
long.”20
The cosmopolitan sentiments of this self-described “penitent spy,” seeking a
photographic look that is at once suavely European and coldly machinic, were in August 1946
turned onto a passing stream of Michigan pedestrians. Evans stood on a street corner with a preset
Rolleiflex camera held low against his body, so that passers-by remained unaware that he was
taking their picture. The resulting images show people in motion from side-on and from the waist
up, sometimes looking down at their feet and sometimes curiously across at the man with the
camera. Interestingly, Fortune magazine published some of these unposed photographs under the
title “Labor Anonymous” in November of that same year. Seeking to counter existing caricatures
of the working-class, Evans nevertheless listed them in his own notes as the personifications of
imagined professions (“millwrights, watchmen, graders,” etc.), thus maintaining their status as
types rather than individuals. In any case, the secret photographing of workers can hardly be
regarded as an innocent or objective matter in a context where industrial labor was already being
constantly photographically monitored and disciplined in the work place.21
The spy photographs of Walker Evans had a strange parallel in those produced for the
Mass Observation movement, operating in Britain from 1937 onward. The growing popularity of
illustrated magazines throughout Europe had generated the relatively new genre of photojournalism, and with it came numerous photographs taken without their subjects’ knowledge or
consent. The pioneer German photographer Erich Salomon, for example, used a light-weight,
compact, large-lensed Ermanox; camera (allowing unobtrusive indoor photos without flash, but
needing tripod and plates) as early as 1928 to take secret snapshots of court-cases (his camera
hidden in a briefcase with a hole for the lens) and politicians in conference. The resulting images
were considered astonishingly informal; here was a type of photograph not afraid to be ugly, not
afraid of being truly candid (“candid camera” was a phrase coined by the editor of Graphic in
1929 specifically to describe Salomon’s images).22
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Dr. Erich Salomon: Colonel Beck and Sean Lester, Geneva, 1936
But practitioners like Salomon also established a new combative creed for the
photojournalist:
“The work of a press photographer who aspires to be more than just a craftsman is a
continuous struggle for his image. As the hunter is a captive of his passion to pursue his game, so
the photographer is obsessed by the unique photograph that he wants to obtain. It is a continual
battle against prejudices resulting from photographers who still work with flashes, against the
administration, the employees, the police, the security guards, against poor lighting and the
enormous problems of taking photographs of people in motion. They must be caught at the
precise moment when they are not moving. Then there is the fight against time, for every
newspaper has its deadline that must be met. Above all, a photojournalist must have infinite
patience, must never become flustered. He must be on top of all events and know when and
where they take place. If necessary, he must use all sorts of tricks, even if they do not always
work.” 23
By the later 1930s, Salomon’s “tricks,” his readiness to take his photographs secretly and
without permission, had become a commonplace aspect of photojournalistic practice, almost a
style necessary to journalism’s believability. Bill Brandt’s photographs for magazines like Picture
Post, for example, look candid even when they aren’t, as if we are a fly on the wall in a coalminer’s home or in the local pub. In 1936 Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, one of many intellectuals residing
in England to escape the Nazi regime in Germany, published a book titled The Street Markets of
London. In his foreword, this former Bauhaus artist claims that “we shall be increasingly
interested in providing a truthful record of objectively determined fact.” No longer concerned
with avant-garde abstraction, he equates “truth” and “fact” with “taking rapid shots without being
observed,” a technique made possible by his small Leica camera and providing, he argued, “rapid
and unprepared fixation of lively scenes that could never have been posed.” The photographs
themselves come to us complete with blurred details and awkward compositions, a visual
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compendium of accidental, ordinary moments and distracted faces, and therefore full of what
Moholy-Nagy called “the natural life of the scene.”24 The work of Salomon, Brandt, and MoholyNagy provides some of the photographic context for the images made by Humphry Spender for
Mass Observation. This movement had been founded in 1936 following the Abdication Crisis
involving Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson, and what some felt was the obvious disparity between
official and popular opinion regarding the monarchy and morality. It was initiated by journalist
and poet Charles Madge through a letter to New Statesman, and he was soon joined by
anthropologist Tom Harrisson and painter and film-maker Humphrey Jennings. Their ambition, to
produce a detailed, empirical ethnography of modern Britain based on the reporting of volunteer
native informants (in effect, spies), was informed by a distinctive mixture of socialism,
surrealism, and the social sciences. Madge, for example, suggested that their field-work should
concentrate on the “popular phenomenon of the coincidence” because British society was so
repressed that “clues” to its true feelings on issues could only be hit upon “in this form.” He
called for surreptitious “mass observations” by a cross-section of the population in order to create
a “mass science” of the British unconscious. The group was interested then in the juxtaposition of
incongruities, but also in the fragmented flow of events and in the differences of individual
interpretations of the same event. The movement’s leaders described its observers as “the cameras
with which we are all trying to photograph contemporary life. ... Mass-Observation has always
assumed that its untrained Observers would be subjective cameras, each with his or her own
distortion. They tell us not what society is like but what it looks like to them.”25
At least one of these observers was however required to carry a real camera. In 1937,
Tom Harrisson asked respected photojournalist Humphry Spender to visit Bolton, which MassOb
had renamed “Worktown,” and unobtrusively photograph life there (Harrisson firmly believed
that “if the observer is observed, the observation is probably invalid”). Coming from a
comfortable middle-class background, Spender had already established himself as a photographer
with leftist leanings and a keen interest in capturing the gritty realities of British class struggle
and working class life. He was only able to spend short periods in Bolton, and was generally
directed (but haphazardly and only orally) by Harrisson (“[photograph] for instance, how people
hold their hands, the number of sugar lumps that people pop into their mouths in restaurants,
etc.”). Spender used a Leica or Zeiss Contax 35 (with wide-angle lens) camera hidden under his
coat to take secret pictures of people going about their lives in public places (Harrisson prohibited
pictures of domestic interiors because it would require the cooperation of the subjects involved).
He sometimes shot with his camera resting on a table or hanging at his waist, so the pictures tend
to be unorganized and unposed, often dappled by uneven lighting, and very ordinary in subject
matter. His main aim, he recalls, was to “provide information ... to allow things to speak for
themselves.”
This, however, entailed certain risks and discomforts. “I believed obsessionally that truth
would be revealed only when people were not aware of being photographed. I had to be invisible.
There was an uncomfortable element of spying in all this and the press was often hostile. We
were called spies, pryers, mass-eavesdroppers, nosey parkers, peeping-toms, lopers, snoopers,
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envelope-steamers, keyhole artists, sex maniacs, sissies, society playboys. ‘If I catch anyone
mass-observing me, there’s going to be trouble’ threatened a Labour MP in the News
Chronicle.”26 And this invisibility was hard to achieve in a working class town like Bolton. “I
always come back to the factor that I was constantly being faced with class distinction, the fact
that I was somebody from another planet, intruding on another kind of life.... I felt very much a
foreigner. ... A constant feature of taking the kind of photographs we’re talking about... was a
feeling that I was intruding, and that I was exploiting the people I was photographing.”27
Despite these misgivings, Spender ended up taking 600-700 pictures, but none of them
were used at the time (although Harrisson might study them to see how many rings people had on
their fingers and such like, regarding the photograph as just so much data). In 1939, World War II
broke out and MassOb’s Utopian social ideals came up against the hard realities of war time. By
1940, the organization was supplying information on home-front morale (e.g. human reactions to
being bombed) to the Ministry of Information. The transformation of Mass Observation into an
organization spying for the state was ironic, given that very soon, Hidden Camera photographs
would become an important part of the activities of, for example, the Dutch Resistance. Members,
such as Fritz and Ingeborg Kahlenberg, hoarded rationed film, snapped pictures of German
activities (persecution of Jews, warfare, confiscation of goods, compulsory labor, starvation) with
cameras concealed in coats or handbags, and tried to smuggle them out of the country. Their
images have the same unposed quality as Moholy-Nagy’s and Spender’s pictures, but far more
purpose and urgency as surveillance documents. 28
Photographing “blind,” or at least allowing chance to play a role in one’s work, is given
an ironic twist in Robert Frank’s 1949-50 sequence of images of a blind couple cuddling in New
York’s Central Park. Circling around from behind the couple, Frank catches them necessarily
unawares.29 This sequence establishes a certain quiet working procedure that is repeated in his
celebrated series of images published in 1959 as The Americans. Most of the subjects captured in
this later project also seem unaware of the photographer’s, presence, but this shield of anonymity
is periodically punctured by the direct look into the camera of one or more of those being pictured
(a man in uniform crossing a street, a blurred kid in a candy store, some transexuals on the streets
of New York, people on a trolley in New Orleans). These occasional returned gazes accentuate
the unobtrusive, matter-of-fact quality of all; the pictures in the book, creating a rhythm of looks
and counter-looks that approximates the experience any flaneur has when traversing the crowded
streets of urban life. But it also makes The Americans function as alternately surveillance and
about surveillance.
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Robert Frank: From the series From the Bus, New York 1958
This alternation is underlined by its exclusion in a 1958 series by Frank where he
photographed his subjects from a passing bus. No return of gazes here. From the Bus, New York
is again marked by a strong sense of the accident, of the chance capturing of unposed street-life.
Frank himself sees this particular body of work in terms of his own feelings about New York.
“Whenever I look at these pictures I think that I ought to be able to say something about the way
it felt when I took them and how I took them (with a Leica) and why I like them. The Bus carries
me thru the City, I look out the window, I look at the people on the street, the Sun and the Traffic
Lights. It has to do with desperation and endurance—I have always felt that about living in New
York. Compassion and probably some understanding for New York’s concrete and its people,
walking ... waiting ... standing up ... holding hands ... the summer of 1958. The gray around the
picture to heighten the feeling of seeing from the inside to the outside. I like to see them one after
another. It’s a ride bye and not a flashy backy.”30
Evans saw Frank’s vision as ironic (“he shows a high irony towards a nation that
generally speaking has it not. ...”), but perhaps it is the photographer’s refusal to take up any
particular position in relation to its subject matter that allows viewers to project a variety of
emotions onto these prints.31 Although he described them as “personal,” Frank himself does not
seem to be present in these images even when his subjects acknowledge his actual presence with
a look. This cool distance (“seeing from the inside to the outside”) was much admired by a
younger generation of photographers, being emulated in the early 1960s in the sophisticated street
photography of Garry Winogrand and many others. However, where Frank’s work claimed a
certain gritty purchase on reality, Winogrand presents us with an arch surreality, with a
photography less about life than about its own processes of picturing. By the 1970s this kind of
self-conscious street photography was coming to us with a measure of intellectual exhaustion (as
in Winogrand’s Women are Beautiful of 1975), or primed with the tawdry tabloid sensibility of
the native informant (Larry Clark’s Tulsa of 1971 or Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency,
published in 1986). It also came with an established pedigree and a recognized set of aesthetic
conventions. In other words, the very qualities that once associated “detective photography” with
the representation of untrammeled reality—the casual framing, haphazard composition,
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uncontrolled lighting, slice-of-life facticity— have now become a formula, copied equally well by
advertising agencies and postmodern mimics.
Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills of the late 1970s, for example, return the look of
surveillance to the posed theatrics of Talbot’s early tableaux vivant, in the process casting doubt
on the very photographic truth values she imitates and exploits. Throughout this series of over
one hundred grainy black and white prints, we see a single woman
Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Still, #83, 1980
(always played by Sherman herself) photographed as if by a hidden paparazzi. She never
seems to see him or us, but looks out or away as if there is something happening off stage. A later
body of work from 1981 reverts to color and the precedent of the magazine centerfold layout and
the TV soap opera. Now the woman is more overtly under pressure; the camera comes in close
like the eye of a voyeur or of an unseen but imminent attacker. Indeed the viewer seems to be
positioned in all Sherman’s early pictures as masculine (and indeed, the history of surveillance
photography seems to be dominated by male practitioners). Whoever is doing the looking,
Sherman presents us with “woman” as the player in a piece of theatre (it’s always her but never
her). For here Sherman is both subject and object of the camera, both director and performer, both
artist and model, both present and absent. Thus the surveyed is also the surveyor, and the only
truth being revealed is that all truth is an elaborate fiction. Fiction is also at the heart of the
variation on street photography offered by American photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia. Beginning with a series made in 1993, he tends to shoot strangely discordant street scenes (in New
York, Naples, Hong Kong), using hidden flashlights to turn them into Hollywood film sets and to
give ordinary faces and bodies an unexplained but charged significance. These images hover
between the authentic and the inauthentic, between reality and its alienation.
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The work of Sherman and diCorcia might be taken as a critique of the art of surveillance
photography that has been so briefly surveyed in this essay. Far from being a marginal
perversion, seeing without being seen has been a central tenet of the practice of photography
throughout its history, a guilty pleasure thought to provide insights into life beyond the reach of
the posed picture. Now that such surveillance has become a pervasive aspect of daily life,
dispassionately gathered by hidden cameras on the street and in the office as much as from
satellites passing far overhead, we might regard this claim a little more skeptically. But how to
respond? Recent art practice offers us at least one possibility: to turn one’s whole life into a
grand, impenetrable pose, to assume the camera is always present and to act accordingly. Or to
turn the tables, or at least the cameras, and concentrate one’s gaze on surveillance itself, bringing
it into the light, forcing it, as here, to make an exhibition of itself.
Notes
1. For a detailed discussion of this timing, see my Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography,
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997.
2. Allan Sekula, Photography between Labour and Capital, in Don Macgillivray and Allan Sekula, with
Robert Wilkie, Mining Photographs and Other Pictures: A Selection from the Negative Archives of
Shedden Studio, Glace Bay, Cape Breton 1948-1968, The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and
Design, Halifax, 1983, p.222. See also John Tagg, A Means of Surveillance: The Photograph as
Evidence in Law (1980), The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographs and Histories,
Macmillan, 1988, pp. 66-102; Dick Hebdige, Posing ... Threats, Striking ... Poses: Youth, Surveillance,
and Display, in SubStance, 37/38, pp. 68-88; David Green, On Foucault: Disciplinary Power and
Photography, in Camerawork, 32, Summer 1985, pp. 6-9; Allan Sekula, The Body and The Archive,
October, 39, Winter 1986, pp. 3-64; Geoffrey Batchen, Photography, Power and Representation in
Afterimage, 16, 7 February 1989, pp. 4-9; David Philips, The Subject of Photography, The Oxford Art
Journal, 12, 2 1989, pp. 115-121, and more recently, Sandra Phillips et al., Police Pictures: The
Photograph as Evidence, San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, 1997.
3. From The Glasgow Mechanics’ Magazine, No. XXXIII, August 7, 1824, as reproduced under the
heading ”Use of the Camera Obscura” in History of Photography, 11, 1, 1987, p. 37.
4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Penguin, 1977, p. 201. So-called
security cameras are now constantly monitoring passers-by in major American and European cities. In
Tampa, Florida, one police department has recently linked these cameras to face-recognition software
so that criminal suspects can be more easily identified and arrested. See Dana Canedy, Tampa Scans
the Faces in its Crowds for Criminals in The New York Times, 4 July 2001, pp. A1, A11.
5. The equation of surveillance and a guilty voyeurism was made explicit in Merry Alpern’s 1993-94
project, titled Dirty Windows. Alpern set up her camera opposite the bathroom window of a men’s
club and surreptitiously photographed the sex and drugs being consumed there. She soon came to feel
the guilty pleasure that so often seems to accompany such seeing. “I used to have a recurring dream; it
went like this: I’m spying on some activity in the window when suddenly, the subject becomes aware
of my presence and looks up. We lock eyes. I know I’m in big trouble. I gasp and wake up.” Merry
Alpern, Dirty Windows, Scalo, Zurich, 1995.
6. See Larry J. Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot, Princeton University Press,
Princeton and Oxford, 2000, pp. 138-139.
7. For more on Hill and Adamson, see Anne M. Lydon et al., Hill and Adamson: Photographs from The
J. Paul Getty Museum, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 1999.
8. See my “Desiring Production” in Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History, The MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA, 2001, pp. 2-24, 192-196.
9. Roy Flukinger, Larry Schaaf, and Standish Meacham, Paul Martin: Victorian Photographer,
University of Texas Press, Austin, 1997, pp. 17-18.
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10. As reported in an advertisement featured in Harper’s Magazine, September 1889, see Anon.
Concealed vest camera, in Image, 11, 4, 1962, pp. 19-20.
11. Edward Leos, Secret Camera: The Photography of Horace Engle, in History of Photography, 1, 1,
1997, pp. 17-30.
12. H.H. Williams, Shooting in the streets, in International Annual, 1889, as quoted in ibid., p. 29.
13. Paul Martin, 1939, as quoted in Paul Martin, p. 42.
14. Op. cit., pp. 25-26
15. See the examples reproduced in Ian Jeffrey, Revisions: An Alternative History of Photography,
National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford 1999, pp.63-64.
16. Lewis Hine, Social Photography: How the camera may help in the social uplift (1909) in Alan
Trachtenberg ed., Classic Essays on Photography, Leete’s Island Books, New Haven, 1980, pp. 109113.
17. The exception, Dorothea Lange’s famous Migrant Mother image of 1936, only serves to prove the
rule. The picture is popular because it is so safe; we can look at this destitute woman, without being
seen, without facing the guilt or fear that comes when the other looks (perhaps accusingly) right back.
18. Walker Evans, from a caption written for a selection of these photographs published in Harper’s
Bazaar, March 1962; see Walker Evans at Work, Thames and Hudson, London, 1983, p. 152.
19. Jeff Rosenheim and Douglas Ekland, Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology, Scale, Zurich and The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2000, p. 186.
20. From two of Evans’ own unpublished notes for the project, as reproduced in Walker Evans at Work,
pp. 160-161.
21. See Unclassified, pp. 186-189. On the photographic surveillance of workers in the early twentieth
century, see Bruce Kaiper, The Cylograph and Work Motion Model, in Lew Thomas and Peter
D’Agostino eds., Still Photography: The Problematic Model, NFS Press, San Francisco, 1981, pp. 5663, and Mike Mandel, Making Good Time, CMP Bulletin, 8:2, 1989. In 1972 Allan Sekula followed in
Evans’ footsteps and photographed an Untitled Slide Sequence (End of day shift, General Dynamics
Convair Division Aerospace factory, San Diego, CA, 17 February 1972) showing workers coming up
some stairs, an installation that, according to the artist, was “playing with the relation between staging
and the everyday event, understanding even that the everyday event already embodied an element of
fiction or theater.” See Allan Sekula, Dismal Science: Photo Works 1972-1996, University Galleries of
Illinois State University, Normal 1999, p. 241.
22. See Tim Gidal, Modern Photojournalism: Origin and Revolution 1910-1933, Macmillan, New York
1973.
23. Salomon, 1931, in the introduction to his book Celebrated Contemporaries in Unguarded Moments, as
quoted in Gisele Freund, Photography & Society, Gordon Fraser, London, 1980, p. 122.
24. Lazlo, Moholy-Nagy, The Street Markets of London, Benjamin Blom, New York 1972, pp. VII-VIII.
For a survey of Bill Brandt’s work, see Ian Jeffrey, Bill Brandt: Photographs 1928-1983, Thames and
Hudson, London 1993.
25. Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson eds., First Year’s Work 1937-38 by Mass-Observation, Lindsay
Drummond, London, March 1938, p. 66. See also Tom Jeffery, Mass-Observation: A Short History,
Mass-Observation Archive Occasional Paper No. 10, University of Sussex Library, Brighton 1999.
26. Humphrey Spender, “Lensman”: Photographs 1932-52, Chatto & Windus, London 1987, p. 15.
27. Spender, in Jeremy Mulford (ed.), Worktown People: Photographs from Northern England 1937-38 by
Humphrey Spender, Falling Wall Press, February 1982, p. 16. See also Ian Jeffrey ed., Worktown:
Photographs of Bolton and Blackpool Taken for Mass Observation 1937/38, Gardner Centre Gallery,
University of Sussex, Brighton 1977 and Deborah Frizzell, Humphrey Spender’s Humanist
Landscapes: Photo-Documents, 1932-1942, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven 1997.
28. See Eric Zafran, The Illegal Camera: Photography in the Netherlands during the German Occupation
1940-1945, exhibition brochure, The Jewish Museum, New York 1996.
29. Robert Frank, Hold Still ... Keep Going, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Sofia, Madrid 2001, pp. 2223, 66-67.
30. See Frank’s comments in W.S. Di Piero et al., Robert Frank: Moving Out, National Gallery of
Art/Scalo, Washington 1994, pp. 204-207.
31. Walker Evans, 1958, as quoted in Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography, from 1839 to the
present, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1982, p. 288.
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