Caught on camera

OBSERVATION:THE CURRENT show at London's Tate Modern, Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera, traces the development of photography and comes to the conclusion that the photographer makes voyeurs of us all.

This, I fear, is unfair to photographers. Who, for instance, can drive past an accident without casting if only a sidelong glance in its direction? Curated by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern, Exposed takes the viewer through 11 rooms each of which, as you might expect, has a surveillance camera in it. But then a conservative estimate suggests that everyone passes through the sights of about 100 CCTV cameras in a normal day, and that’s not counting other devices, such as automatic number plate recognition and mobile phone GPS locators.

At Tate Modern, each room is devoted to a certain aspect of photography, kicking off with the hidden camera. Photographer Tom Howard photographed death by electric chair, entering the prison equipped with two cameras – one under his jacket, to be easily discovered by the guards, and a second one concealed in his trouser leg, which he had to hitch up slightly at the moment of death using a long cable release that went from the camera to his pocket. Thus the death of Ruth Snyder in 1928 is recorded, the image smudged and shuddering, leaving you to wonder was this due to camera shake or electricity.

Death, the final taboo, is explored in room eight – “Witnessing Violence” – offering images of a lynching, the deaths of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, a pregnant woman injecting herself, and one of a mother and child in famine-stricken India, the three-month-old child weighing just three pounds. Do such images bear witness to the wrongs they portray or, if shown repeatedly, do they instead render us immune to that message? The latter, it seems, for the famine photograph was taken in 1877.

It was around this time that photography came out of the studio and on to the streets. Advanced techniques, which later included high-speed printing presses and cheaper paper, allowed photographers with an interest in society to record life on the street, with many of their subjects too exhausted, drunk or ill to notice that their privacy was being invaded.

Street journalism took a further leap forward with the development of the lateral or right-angled view finder, which allowed the photographer to point the camera in one direction while shooting in another – a device often used nowadays by police surveillance teams.

The resulting images at the Tate are often contemplative, showing people quiet in their own world, and because of that, we want to stare all the longer. What are they thinking about? Why is that man looking so inexpressibly sad? (Paul Strand, Plate No 2.) One photographer, Walker Evans, referred to photography as a “left-handed hobby”, for images such as these blur the boundary between private and public, between them and us, between the camera and the powerless.

But what of those who actually want to be photographed? In the 1860s, the countess of Castiglione had the money and enough self-regard to have herself photographed in various guises and poses no less than 400 times (plates 68-70), predating Hello magazine by a good century.

The camera started the cult of modern celebrity, a cult fastforwarded by paparazzi and reality TV. A grainy image of Paris Hilton, crying as she is being driven away to prison, was taken through the window of her car, but so often has she been photographed that we really don’t care about her tears. The photo was taken by Nick Ut, who, some 35 years earlier, gave us the image of a small naked girl, napalm peeling away her skin as she runs down a road somewhere in Vietnam. Two images, different responses, same photographer.

So immune have we become to invasive photography, breast enlargement and David Beckham in his underwear, that those paparazzi photos of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor – he snug as Daniel Craig in his swimming trunks and she in a decorous one-piece swimsuit – make you wonder what all the fuss was about.

And then along came Abu Ghraib and yes, we were shocked. The image of two US soldiers smiling to camera above the pyramid of Iraqi prisoners illustrated the point that the thrill of being photographed and seen by billions of people on seven continents was greater than the circumstances surrounding the taking of the photo.

Exposed is about photographs and those who view them. There is no focus on the intentions of the photographer, but it would be remiss not to accept that what we see reflects something of the mind of the photographer and therein lies the art of photography.

A photograph appeared in this paper some years ago, chronicling a time when some women in Ireland decided that they would swim in Dublin’s Forty-Foot, long the sanctum of male nude swimming. The photo marking this event shows the back view of a naked woman emerging from the water. Nowadays, it is possible to go skinny-dipping on deserted beaches from Donegal to Inishbofin, but in the 1980s, a woman swimming naked was a rare sight and, quite rightly, the photographer has placed her in the middle of the picture. Our eyes, however, are led beyond her to the crowd of men and boys who have turned up to stare. The photographer, by a combination of artistry, compassion and political awareness, has turned the watchers into voyeurs, leaving them far more exposed than the naked woman.

Photography is a three-way interaction between photographer, subject and viewer and at a click can turn the viewer into a voyeur. We should all be aware of exposure.

Exposureis at Tate Modern until October 3rd. As part of this exhibition, Tate Modern has made available a series of interviews with some photographers talking about their work: Channel.Tate.org.uk