civilized ku # 796 ~ I like to watch / look

Blue jeep ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggenIn the movie Being There, Chance the gardener, aka: Chauncey Gardener, informs Eve Rand that he "likes to watch". Chauncey means that he likes to watch TV but under the circumstances - Rand is trying to seduce him - Eve assumes that Chauncey is a voyeur. That is, according to the dictionary, a person who gets sexual pleasure from watching sexual acts. In many cases, the watching is a surreptitious act.

That said, in the photo Art world, the word "voyeurism" has taken on the meaning of "invasive looking" - an act that is not necessarily erotic or predatory. In that sense, voyeurism / invasive looking has been part of the picture making lexicon since the dawn of the photographic age - an obvious example being that of street photography.

IMO, the descriptive adjective "invasive" seems most appropriately applied when the picture in question (or the making thereof) includes a person or persons as a key referent. To my way of looking, it would seem to be rather difficult to make an "invasive" picture of a something like, say, a house plant.

In any event, while I have always been aware of the idea of voyeurism in my picture making, I have been increasingly aware of that picture making characteristic, especially so in my nascent body of work, Single women. Without a doubt, that series has the notion of voyeurism front and center. However, that said, I am beginning to think that I want to make more visually obvious - and by extension, more suggestively / implied obvious - the idea of voyeurism in my non-people pictures.

As coincidence would have it, as I was googling for the dictionary definition of the words voyeur / voyeurism, I came across a current exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera Since 1870. The exhibit is touted as "a major survey that examines photography's role in invasive looking ... and gathers more than 200 pictures that together form a timely inquiry into the ways in which artists and everyday people alike have probed the camera's powerful voyeuristic capacity."

I would dearly like to see this exhibit but it won't be coming to a museum near me any time soon, if ever. Fortunately - and I hope Santa is reading this - there is a hardcover exhibit catalog by the same name that "[F]eatures images by photographers both unknown and renowned with insightful essays and commentary by SFMOMA Senior Curator of Photography Sandra Phillips."

I can only hope that the book, its writings and its pictures, is as interesting as it sounds to be.