The Furtive Gaze
I was carrying a camera too, but it was in my shoulder bag. I also had in there a spare copy of the brochure for “The Furtive Gaze,” an exhibition of work by four photographers and one videographer at the Museum of Contemporary Photography that’s all about voyeurs and strangers. The passenger I took for a photographer got off the el before I could hand him the brochure. Maybe I should have taken his picture.
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For “The Furtive Gaze,” MCP associate curator Karen Irvine selected five artists who turn strangers into subjects, usually without their knowledge or consent. Merry Alpern shot women shoppers in department store dressing rooms with a hidden video camera; Sophie Calle stalked a man with her camera in Venice; Melanie Manchot asked strangers on the street for a kiss while wearing a hidden video camera; Chris Verene shot other male photographers in the act of shooting nude female models; and Shizuka Yokomizo wrote letters to strangers asking them to pose for her on a specified night at their windows with all the lights on. As Irvine comments, “The voyeur’s position is also our own, implicating our illicit interest in the scene.” This exhibition is unusually deft at making viewers think about the ethics of viewing. Are photographs more truthful for spectators when the photographer in effect lies to subjects? Also, each artist in “The Furtive Gaze” asks us to believe a back story about how the imagery was created, which might be said to give the photographs greater authenticity. But by revealing the artists’ duplicity, they make us wonder if the stories themselves are true.
Verene’s 12 chromogenic prints from his 1997 series “Camera Club” draw the viewer into a clearly erotic scene. Shot both indoors and outside, they picture men who’ve placed newspaper ads soliciting women to model nude, “pretending to be professional fashion photographers,” as Irvine’s wall text puts it. Verene in turn pretends to be one of them, shooting from behind their backs to capture them in the act of shooting the women, who appear in Verene’s backgrounds. Whether working as a documentary photographer who’s deconstructing the male gaze or merely impersonating one to shoot nudes, Verene can be seen as a sort of backstabber. Humiliating his fellow shooters, he frames their backsides and usually omits their faces. The most telling contrast between the men and the women is an untitled shot showing the elbow of a photographer cocked at the same angle as the arm of his model: while he operates the camera, she places her hand behind her head in a classic cheesecake pose.
