| Description |
Have we become a society of voyeurs? The proliferation of camera phones, YouTube videos, satellite technology and reality television series would certainly suggest that this is so. If our capacity to look seems increasingly boundless, however, it also threatens to make us a nation under surveillance. Amid endless political debates about terrorism, the security camera has become one of the icons of our age.
Despite these developments, there have been surprisingly few attempts to examine the history of what might be called invasive looking. Published to coincide with a major exhibition at Tate Modern, Exposed aims to fill this critical void. Images ranging from the 1870s to the present day present an alternately shocking, illuminating and witty perspective on subjects both iconic and taboo. The work of street photographers and paparazzi, amateur shots of death and disaster, police surveillance photography and the recent trend for self-documentation of private acts on the internet are all examined and explored by eminent critics, alongside the work of some of the leading artists of the last hundred years. |