In a photograph by Robert Frank, culled for this exhibition from his path-breaking social documentary project The Americans (1958), three figures confront the viewer. Two smile hesitantly back at the lens, but it is the reaction of the third which burns itself into the mind. He covers his face with his left hand, thus hiding his identity, but also spreads the long, bony fingers of that hand just enough to enable him to return Frank’s gaze. Enfolded in this complex gesture, at once a parody of the tunnel-vision of the prurient photographer and a reference to the flirtatious self-concealment practiced by celebrities, lurks the major question raised by Exposed. What drives our compulsion to stare at the intimate details of other lives provided by the camera?
The five sections of the exhibition explore the themes of unseen photography, sex and desire, celebrity, violence, and surveillance systems. Each contains images with the power to shock, and the inclusion of, for example, Cuesta del Plomo (1981) by Susan Meiselas – a photograph of a Nicaraguan execution site in which a corpse, reduced to a pair of legs and a flayed spinal column, appears prominently in the foreground – will surely reignite the debate on whether the effect of such ‘atrocity pictures’ is to stimulate the political sympathies of the viewer, or to numb.
Commendably, however, Exposed never becomes (as it so easily could have done) a muckraking celebration of horror itself. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1976-96) by Nan Goldin, a slide show of dozens of photographs documenting the social and romantic entanglements of the artist and her friends, is unsettling in an entirely different way to the Meiselas image. Pictures of sex and intravenous drug use alternate with informal portraits and snapshots from parties and weddings, creating a quasi-ethnographic study of the group that Goldin described as her ‘tribe’. By bringing together two such different works, drawn from genres usually kept apart by formidable institutional barriers (photojournalism and fine art photography), the exhibition reveals the surprisingly diverse forms that voyeuristic images have taken.
This variety is, in part, a testament to the ingenuity of certain camera makers, whose inventions have helped photographers to work covertly. Some of the most engaging objects on display in Exposed are not photographs but the bizarre technologies used to produce them, such as the right-angle (i.e. sideways) viewfinder sold by the Eastman Kodak Company, and a shoe with a tiny camera hidden in its heel. While the latter may sound less than practicable, a device similar to it – an ankle-level camera operated by a shutter release cable threaded into a trouser pocket – was used by the journalist Tom Howard to take his chilling photograph of The Electrocution of Ruth Snyder (1928). This grim document gains much of its emotional impact from its blurry imperfection, a consequence of the five second exposure time which Howard needed to create it.
Technology is also a central concern of the final section of the exhibition, on surveillance, yet the materials gathered here do not quite gel with those to be found in the preceding rooms. The unconscious, indefatigable stare of the CCTV camera or military targeting system raises a different set of issues to voyeuristic imagery produced by human agents. Moreover, several works, such as the pictures of handsome young men working out on a Rio beach by Alair Gomes, taken from his apartment window with a telephoto lens, would seem to belong better in the section on unseen photography. Aside from this, however, Exposed is sensitively curated for a large Tate exhibition, and fascinating and disturbing in equal measure.
Until Sep 19
THOMAS BALFE
The five sections of the exhibition explore the themes of unseen photography, sex and desire, celebrity, violence, and surveillance systems. Each contains images with the power to shock, and the inclusion of, for example, Cuesta del Plomo (1981) by Susan Meiselas – a photograph of a Nicaraguan execution site in which a corpse, reduced to a pair of legs and a flayed spinal column, appears prominently in the foreground – will surely reignite the debate on whether the effect of such ‘atrocity pictures’ is to stimulate the political sympathies of the viewer, or to numb.
Commendably, however, Exposed never becomes (as it so easily could have done) a muckraking celebration of horror itself. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1976-96) by Nan Goldin, a slide show of dozens of photographs documenting the social and romantic entanglements of the artist and her friends, is unsettling in an entirely different way to the Meiselas image. Pictures of sex and intravenous drug use alternate with informal portraits and snapshots from parties and weddings, creating a quasi-ethnographic study of the group that Goldin described as her ‘tribe’. By bringing together two such different works, drawn from genres usually kept apart by formidable institutional barriers (photojournalism and fine art photography), the exhibition reveals the surprisingly diverse forms that voyeuristic images have taken.
This variety is, in part, a testament to the ingenuity of certain camera makers, whose inventions have helped photographers to work covertly. Some of the most engaging objects on display in Exposed are not photographs but the bizarre technologies used to produce them, such as the right-angle (i.e. sideways) viewfinder sold by the Eastman Kodak Company, and a shoe with a tiny camera hidden in its heel. While the latter may sound less than practicable, a device similar to it – an ankle-level camera operated by a shutter release cable threaded into a trouser pocket – was used by the journalist Tom Howard to take his chilling photograph of The Electrocution of Ruth Snyder (1928). This grim document gains much of its emotional impact from its blurry imperfection, a consequence of the five second exposure time which Howard needed to create it.
Technology is also a central concern of the final section of the exhibition, on surveillance, yet the materials gathered here do not quite gel with those to be found in the preceding rooms. The unconscious, indefatigable stare of the CCTV camera or military targeting system raises a different set of issues to voyeuristic imagery produced by human agents. Moreover, several works, such as the pictures of handsome young men working out on a Rio beach by Alair Gomes, taken from his apartment window with a telephoto lens, would seem to belong better in the section on unseen photography. Aside from this, however, Exposed is sensitively curated for a large Tate exhibition, and fascinating and disturbing in equal measure.
Until Sep 19
THOMAS BALFE