Captured by unseen spies

Photographer Erin Quinn’s new show aims to shake up complacency about a society in which people are constantly being observed, and where the State retains the data

ERIN Quinn's confrontational exhibition, Surveillance, which opens today at the new Centre for Creative Practices in Pembroke Street, Dublin, drills home the manner in which we are relentlessly watched on screen. Her photographs and footage deal with the increased surveillance of public, work and private spaces in modern life.

Quinn takes airports as her case study. She spent a year in Dublin airport, photographing passengers from the top-down perspective of a CCTV camera. At first the photographs strike the viewer as exceptionally normal, with the graphic details of the figures’ clothing or baggage set off against a bland background. On further inspection they’re more troubling, insidious.

Quinn says that observing from a high vantage point led her to suspect and categorise individuals. Why does X wear a hat or have a beard? Why does Y hangs his head low? Why is Z looking around nervously? And so on. We begin to ask: what do security personnel experience while viewing our perambulations on a screen? Boredom, horror or enjoyment?

We also begin to wonder what Quinn’s anonymous subjects would feel if they were to catch sight of themselves in one of her art pieces. Although she took the photographs with legal permission from the airport authorities, the subjects have not given their consent and are unaware of being used and involuntarily grouped together. Quinn’s dilemma was between carrying out an invasion of privacy or perpetuating public nonchalance. It deeply disturbed her, as it might many of us, to think that our facial characteristics, expressions, gaits and banal or not-so-banal exchanges, are being archived in a national security database.

Recent news on data retention and mass surveillance drove Quinn to this plucky edge. At a time when all forms of security come under the conflated “counter-terrorism”/’crime prevention” banner, the EU has allocated €200 million for security research, modelling its policies and technical apparatus on Israel and the US. In Ireland, the 2009 Communications (Retention of Data) Bill allows all telephone calls and texts to be stored for two years, internet data for one year. This makes Ireland’s information retention period one of the longest in the EU. The average UK citizen makes more than 300 CCTV appearances per day. When talking about photography we might refer to a scene or mood being “captured”. Quinn is unique in linking the photographic intrusion we face daily, even hourly, with being “captured” or imprisoned. Her airport sessions were inspired by French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-84), particularly his studies of 18th-century designs for a “Panopticon”. This was a round prison structure composed of multiple cells, with a cylinder in the middle from which gaolers could watch the incarcerated without being seen. This external surveillance, a “subtle coercion” of the vulnerable, is strongly felt in Quinn’s photographs.

Quinn also studied George Orwell's 1984, which, written in the 1940s, shows that the debate between privacy and safety is not new. Orwell's novel originated the term "Big Brother", prophesying surveillance on a level that can reach, and terrify, a mass audience. Influenced by his observation of totalitarian regimes, Orwell created the fictional "Oceania", a society under complete state control producing uniformly submissive people who, if sitting within range of the Big Brother "telescreen", might be punished for "thought crime" or "face crime".

Is CCTV a technocratic example of the voyeurism Orwell and Foucault detected in the 20th century? When spied during travel, shopping, work, queuing, is each of us reduced to a suspect? Or are we just ciphers, seen through a glass darkly? If we’re certain we aren’t dangerous individuals, but feel affected by Quinn’s work, we may want to take a closer look.

Surveillanceis at the Centre for Creative Practices, 15 Pembroke Street Lower, Dublin 2, until next Thursday, Aug 19; cfcp.ie