Big Brother or The New Normal? The Panopticon is an institutional building designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The design consists of a circular structure with an "inspection house" at its center, from which the managers or staff of the institution are able to watch the inmates, who are stationed around the perimeter. The Panopticon ("all-seeing") was to function as a round-the-clock surveillance machine. Its design ensured that no prisoner could ever see the 'inspector' who conducted surveillance from the central location. The prisoner would never know when he was being watched -- mental uncertainty that in itself would prove to be a crucial instrument of discipline Bentham described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind. The Panopticon prison design was invoked by the French historian Michel Foucault as metaphor for modern "disciplinary" societies. Foucault: The inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. he becomes the principle of his own subjection. Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi: Bodies of executed Communards (1871)
In 1870, the citizens of Paris staged a rebellion against the national government, which had just been defeated by the Germans in a humiliating war that included a long siege of the city. The Commune, as it was called, was crushed quite quickly and many of the Communards executed or deported. Images like this one were used to identify the dead; relatives would pour over these images looking for their loved ones. Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi: Bodies of executed Communards (1871) Unknown: Portraits of Communards (1871)
On the other hand, pictures like these were used by the government to identify Communards, who were then arrested and deported to New Caledonia. Unknown: Portraits of Communards (1871) After the invention of photography, police began to keep rogues galleries, but it was not until Alphonse Bertillon, a French civil servant, developed his method that they had a system by which to organize all this information. The Bertillon method combined detailed measurement and classification of features with frontal and profile photographs of suspectsand which recorded the information on standardized cards in orderly files. From a mass of details, recorded on hundreds of thousands of cards, it was possible to sift and sort down the cards until a small stack of cards produced the combined facts of the measurements of the individual sought. The identification process was confirmed by the photographs included on the individual's card. The Bertillon method Alphonse Bertillon: Bertillion card
The system received a severe blow in 1903 in Leavenworth, Kansas. While taking the measurements of one Will West, officials found that he was indeed a repeat offender. Mr. West mightily protested this charge, and upon further examination of the records, the jailers discovered that they already had one William West in their custody, with the same Bertillon measurements. Every measurement slowly reveals the workings of the criminal. Careful observation and patience will reveal the truth."Alphonse Bertillon Alphonse Bertillon: Bertillioncard Clara Smith / Arne Svenson (1900-08/1997)
These pictures were taken by the town photographer, Clare Smith, in Marysville, California, and rediscovered in the 1990s. Svenson researched the cases and produced a book, Prisoners, that related the image to the crime. Clara Smith / Arne Svenson ( /1997) Marc Garanger: Algerian women (1960)
The identity photograph is a not-so-distant cousin to the mug shot. In 1960 Marc Garanger, then a 25-year-old French military conscript and photographer in Algeria, was ordered to photograph Algerian women without their veils for identification purposes in a new anti-terrorism campaign. Garanger photographed around 2,000 Algerian women, many of whom had spent their entire adult life veiled, and eventually went on to exhibit the controversial works in France and elsewhere. Subsequent exhibitions of the works have provoked numerous angry responses from viewers, critics and Algerian nationals over the years. Marc Garanger: Algerian women (1960) Nhem En: Cambodian prisoners (1970s)
In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge, a radical Maoist group, overthrew the government of Cambodia and engaged in what amounted to genocide especially focusing on opponents of the regime. During the Khmer Rouge years, many of the enemies of the state were imprisoned in a notorious prison, S-21. Only 14 people survived their imprisonment which began with the taking of these ID shots. Nhem En: Cambodian prisoners (1970s) Humphrey Spender: Mass Observation
Mass Observation was founded in 1937 to create an anthropology of ourselves. They recruited a team of observers photographers and writers -- to study the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. Investigators went into a variety of public situations: meetings, religious occasions, sporting and leisure activities, in the street and at work, and recorded people's behavior and conversation in as much detail as possible. Mass Observation continued to operate throughout the Second World War and into the early 1950 but gradually the emphasis shifted away from social issues towards consumer behavior. Humphrey Spender: Mass Observation Bruce Nauman: Live-Video Corridor
Nauman set two monitors above one another at the end of a corridor. The lower monitor displays a videotape of the corridor. The upper monitor shows a closed-circuit tape recording of a camera at the entrance to the corridor. On entering the corridor and approaching the monitors, you quickly come under the area surveyed by the camera. The closer you get to the monitor, the farther you are from the camera, with the result that your image on the monitor becomes smaller. In addition, you see yourself from behind. So you are walking away from yourself and monitoring yourself. Bruce Nauman: Live-Video Corridor Through a confusion of names, Hasan Elahi, a Bangladeshi-born American, got on the terrorist watch list and was detained whenever returning to the country. As a defensive measures, Elahi has made his life an open book, documenting nearly every waking hour of his life on his website, posting copies of every debit card transaction and meals. He carries a GPS device in his pocket that reports his real-time physical location on a map. Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he's doing. As can we. Hasan Elahi Jill Magid: Evidence Locker
A 2007 survey of 47 countries ranked eight as being endemic surveillance societies China, Malaysia, Russia, Singapore, the UK, Taiwan, Thailand, and the US. Britain is said to have more CCTV cameras than any other country this as a result of the IRA bombings of the 1970s. Unless requested as evidence, CCTV footage obtained is stored for 31 days and then erased. For access to this footage, you have to submit a formal request. For 31 days, Jill Magid worked with the Liverpool authorities on a video surveillance project. Wearing a bright red trench coat, she would call the police on duty with details of her whereabouts and ask them to film her in particular poses, places or even guide her through the city with her eyes closed. Magid chose to complete her access request forms as though they were letters to a lover, expressing how she was feeling and what she was thinking. These letters form the diary One Cycle of Memory in the City of L- an intimate portrait of the relationship between herself, the police and the city. Jill Magid: Evidence Locker Jason Bruges: Leicester lampposts
Jason Bruges created these smart" street lamps in Leicester, England, that display the color of every passing car. Bruges:"Real-time tracking and information gathering will only get more sophisticated. I think it's very important to subvert these technologies and use them in a playful way so people become less scared and more comfortable with this technology that already surrounds them." Jason Bruges: Leicester lampposts Marie Sester: Access Spotlight System, Mexico City
Access Spotlight System catches random pedestrians in a spotlight as they walk through the city. Sester: My work ... is not making a statement about surveillance and subjection or manipulation. It intentionally stays on the edges between playful and scary to reveal the underlying perversion." Marie Sester: Access Spotlight System, Mexico City Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is a Mexican-Canadian electronic artist, best known for creating theatrical interactive installations that explore themes of perception and surveillance. Using robotics, real-time computer graphics, film projections, positional sound, internet links, cell phone interfaces, video and ultrasonic sensors, LED screens and other devices, he creates interruptions blips in public settings. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Surveillance Camera Players
The Surveillance Camera Players stage performances focused on issues of surveillance. In SF, they have led a hidden-camera walking tour and in NY, they have staged performances in front of security cameras, in subway stations, Times Square,: George Orwells 1984 and Animal Farm, Alfred Jarrys Ubu Roi, Becketts Waiting for Godot, Poes The Raven. These public spectacles are intended to get people to question the role of surveillance is playing in our lives. Surveillance Camera Players Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal made headlines for his year-long project by surgically mounting a live-feed camera to the back of his head to comment on surveillance. For Domestic Tension, Bilal lived in a gallery space for a month while observers viewed him from a webcam and remotely fired a paintball gun at him. Yes, his themes are political and his tactics are heavy, but so is war. Wafaa Bilabl Trevor Paglens photographs black sites
Trevor Paglens photographs black sites. A number of classified military bases and installations are located in some of the remotest parts of the United States, hidden deep in western deserts and buffered by dozens of miles of restricted land. Many of these sites are so remote there is not place where a civilian can see them with an unaided eye. To produce these images, Paglens used limit-telephotography, using high powered telescopes with focal lengths range between 1300mm and 7000mm. Limit-telephotography most closely resembles astrophotography, a technique that astronomers use to photograph objects that might be trillions of miles from Earth. Trevor Paglens: Large Hangars and Fuel Storage, Tonopah Test Range, NV, Distance ~ 18 miles, 10:44 am This series depicts 189 secret spy satellites despite the fact that, officially speaking, the satellites don't exist. In taking these photos, Paglen proposes an anti-authoritarian, democratic practice. Along those lines, he draws an analogy between modern government secrecy and the doctrine of the Catholic Church in Galileo's time. Paglens: "What would it mean to find these secret moons in orbit around the earth in the same way that Galileo found these moons that shouldn't exist in orbit around Jupiter? More significant than the discovery itself, Paglen says, was the idea that anyone with a telescope could verify it and see the same exact thing that Galileo saw -- an idea Paglen is trying to re-create in his own photographs. Trevor Paglens: Keyhole 12-3 Crossing the Sky Near the Constellation of Scorpio; Lacrosse/Onyx II Passing Through Draco (USA 69), from The Other Night Sky Ai Weiwei spends hours a day online and remains very active on Twitter, though it's blocked within China. Ai: The Internet is such a beautiful miracle for the society here, like China, because we are still living under a very restricted dictatorship. You know, we are still dealing with a very restricted control on freedom of expression. And the Internet probably is the only vehicle for people to even sense there's another person who shares the same idea or who can offer different information about what is happening. And that is the foundation for civil society. The line between surveillance and voyeurism is increasingly blurredgiven Google Street View and its like. California artist Doug Rickard created images of blighted neighborhoods using Google Street View. Mishka Henner: again Google Street Views, now of what appear to be women soliciting sex in the outskirts of various European cities. Voyeurism Walker Evans: From Many Are Called, 1938-1941
In this series of images Many Are Called -- Evans turned away from the humanistic FSA style. He took these pictures with a hidden camera. Inspired by Sanders work and the Ashcan school of painting, these images document individual forms of public display and the ritualized act of looking and being looked at. In this work Evans is heir to the quintessential 19th century figure of the flaneur. As defined by Baudelaire, the flaneur is a person who walks the city in order to observe it. Walker Evans: From Many Are Called, Robert Frank: From the Bus
Robert Frank: "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 about living in New York. Compassion and probably some understanding for New Yorks Concrete and its people, walking waiting standing holding hands the summer of 1958. Robert Frank: From the Bus Kohei Yoshihuki: from The Park (1971)
Taken in Tokyo parks during the 1970s, these infrared, flash photographs are voyeuristic images of voyeurs. Yoshiyuki photographed people who gathered at night for clandestine trysts and the spectators lurking in the bushes who watchedand sometimes participated inthese couplings. Martin Parr: The Park is a brilliant piece of social documentation, capturing perfectly the loneliness, sadness, and desperation that so often accompany sexual or human relationships in a big, hard metropolis like Tokyo. Kohei Yoshihuki: from The Park (1971) Sophie Calle: Addressbook
In the early 1980s, Sophie Calle found an address book on the street in Paris. Before mailing it back to its ownera filmmaker called Pierre D.she photocopied the contents and then proceeded to call each person listed in it to ask questions about him. I will try to discover who he is without ever meeting him, and I will try to produce a portrait of him over an undetermined length of time that will depend on the willingness of his friends to talk about himand on the turns taken by the events, she wrote. She turned her encounters into short pieces, which were published almost daily over the course of a month in the newspaper Libration. When Pierre D. discovered what Calle was doing, he threatened to sue her for invasion of privacy, and she agreed not to re-publish the work until after his death. Sophie Calle: Addressbook Sophie Calle: The Hotel
For the series The Hotel (1983), Calle posed as a chambermaid in a Venice pensione to investigate the lives of strangers through their possessions and habits. In the guests absence, she photographed opened luggage, laundry, contents of bathrooms, and even trashcans, noting details gleaned from diaries, letters, and so on. Each of the twelve works in the series (one for each room Calle was assigned to clean) consists of a grid of photographs shown alongside a larger image of the hotel rooms bed, which is above a text written by the artist. Freely combining fact and conjecture, the texts include quotes and details from the documents Calle read as well as her own interpretations of the people whose privacy she playfullyand almost criminallyinvaded. Sophie Calle: The Hotel Sophie Calle: Cash Machine Calle: In April 1981, at my request, my mother went to a detective agency. She hired them to follow me, to report on my daily activities, and to provide photographic evidence of my existence. Both the detective and Sophie Calle wrote a detailed report on the course of that one day. Whereas normally the principle behind a covert pursuit is that the observed person is unaware of being observed, in Sophie Calle's peculiar staging it is the detective who does not realize that the person he is shadowing knows of his existence. Philip-Lorca diCorcias Heads were taken on the streets of New York in 2000, also without their subjects knowledge or permission, but this time through an elaborate series of hidden cameras and automatic flashes that were triggered as people walked past. One of his unwitting targets took legal action against diCorcia, which resulted in a landmark ruling that the artists right to self-expression took precedence over the subjects right to their ownimage. Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Head #9; Head #13 (both 2000) Streulis photographs and videos depict frieze-like crowds advancing toward the viewer that recall mass media images billboards. An impression heightened by his use of a telephoto lens and extra-large image size. The use of such mechanisms implies a commentary on surveillance practices in contemporary society. Like a photo-journalist, these images comments upon the photographers potential to witness, interpret, and even shape actual events at the time of the shoot.But these are not documentary images tied to time and place,t ratherthey are artistic images that mimic documentary forms. Streulis method is to make repeated visits to a specific location in a city and shoot, from a discrete distance, people who pass in front of his fixed camera. Like Evans subway riders, these subjects are anonymous yet part of a larger urban community. Streuli depicts people who live in globalized cities andresemble one another in terms of their clothing and mannerisms. His images focus on their gestures and everyday details; logos, cell phones, and head sets. In his videos the subject's movements are slowed, heightening the effect of each gesture. Beat Streuli Paul Graham: from The Present
Karen Rosenberg: Paul Graham reinvents street photography for an age of perpetual distraction. The Present was shot in high-traffic areas of Manhattan (Penn Station, Times Square and 125th Street) and presented as sequences showing multiple views of the same intersection, taken seconds apart and from more or less the same angle. Paul Graham: from The Present Merry Alpern: From the Windows series (1994)
For her Dirty Windows series [1993-4] Alpern sat behind a darkened window in Wall Street watching the goings-on in an apartment opposite where a short-stop hotel had recently opened. Looking through a vertically divided, dirty window she was witness to such intimate scenes as undressing, kissing and sex, counting money and taking drugs. Alperns photos convey a sense of being an initiate of something private or even forbidden combined with her constant fear of being discovered. Merry Alpern: From the Windows series (1994) Merry Alpern: From Shopping series (1999)
Her next series, Shopping [1997], consists of video stills for which Alpern used a hidden camera. In spring 1997 she began to record her own shopping habits, which had begun to perplex her: she would shop relentlessly without buying. So she began to wonder what the appeal of shopping is. Attaching a small surveillance-type video camera to a handbag made of eyelet lace, she filmed both herself and other women in the fitting rooms. This method produced arbitrary, unplanned shots, some via a mirror. They show shopping as an experience, but the scenes are at odds with Alperns own recollections. The handbag perspective is also unusual and roughly corresponds to that of a child. Merry Alpern: From Shopping series (1999) Yokomizo sends her subjects an anonymous letter proposing they stand in the front window of their home at a specified date and time, at which point the artist arrives outside, sets up her tripod and camera, exposes her film, and then leaves. The subjects are instructed to turn on all their lights, wear their usual clothing, and remain still, or if they choose not to participate, to signal this by drawing their curtains. Because the hour selected is during the night, Yokomizos subjects can discern the photographer only as a dark silhouette. Shizuka Yokomizo Rather than focusing onstrangers passing by in a public space, Michele Iversen photographs people in their private space without their permission. She has photographed people binge-eating, washing dishes, sleeping. Iversen admits she feels uncomfortable watching her subjects and wants her audience to be uncomfortable looking at her photographs as well. Iversen: "I find my theater, you know the actual window, and then the performance begins. They are like these beautiful tableaux to me, they tell a story they show peoples lives. Michele Iversen: Night Surveillance Svenson inherited a bird-watching telephoto lens from a friend and used it to photograph the neighbors across the street. The grid structure of the windows frame their daily activities as a picture. The Neighbors is social documentation in a very rarified environment. Arne Svenson: The Neighbors Jenni Ringley: JenniCAM, 1996-2003
In April 1996, during her junior year of college, Jenni Ringley installed a webcam in her dorm room and provided images from that cam on her webpage. The page refreshed every three minutes. Anyone with Internet access could observe the often mundane events of Ringley's life. JenniCam was one of the first web sites that continuously and voluntarily surveyed a private life. During the first couple years of JenniCam, Ringley performed stripteases for the webcam but stopped after receiving andemand to do a show. On refusing, she received death threats and thereafter stopped the practice. Somewhat curiously, she turned off the camera during especially private moments, but eventually she abandoned that practice, and images were captured of Ringley engaging in sex. With all details of Ringley's life on display, this was one of the first opportunities ever, in any medium, to legally observe the ordinary human sexual behavior of a complete stranger. Mark Tribe: In Web sites like JenniCAM, surveillance became a source of voyeuristic and exhibitionistic excitement... Institutional surveillance and the invasion of privacy have been widely explored by New Media artists." Jenni Ringley: JenniCAM, Josh Harris: film still from We Live in Public
In 1999, Josh Harris an internet pioneer who founded the first Internet television network -- created his vision of the future, an underground bunker in NYC where 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days. His experiment, in which people willingly traded privacy for fame, dissected how media and technology affects how we interact with another and how we establish and present our personal identity. After the NY police shut the bunker down, Harris and his girlfriend lived for six months under 24-hour live surveillance online until she walked out and he suffered a mental collapse. Josh Harris: film still from We Live in Public Blast Theory: Uncle Roy All Around You
Blast Theory is a British artists' group that uses new media to create participatory performances and interactive art that mixes audiences across the internet, the real world, and digital broadcasting. The groups work explores interactivity and the social and political aspects of technology and considers the implications of a media saturated world. Uncle Roy All Around You is mixxed-reality game in which players searched through the streets for a character named Uncle Roy. Online players team with players out on the street, each navigating their own version of the city. Street Players use handheld computers to search for Uncle Roy, using the map and incoming messages to move through the city. Online Players cruise through a virtual map of the same area, searching for Street Players to help them find a secret destination. Using web cams, audio and text messages players must work together to find Uncle Roy. Blast Theory: Uncle Roy All Around You