Voyeur: getting close from a distance

Untitled, San Francisco, September 2007.

I admit: I'm a voyeur; not by design but by happenstance. Any person who spends time like I do to observe humanity on the street is bound to become privy to intimacies displayed on the street. These publicly displayed intimacies are compelling subjects for me (what can be more human than affection?); and for a few seconds my camera and I become arm's-length participants in a private moment between non-complicit subjects, a third wheel, an intruder. In short, a voyeur.


A delectable book on peeping-tommery, entitled, what else, Voyeur, traces photography's long history and inevitable relationship with voyeurism in its many forms. From photography's earliest days, circa 1910, heads turn (the photographer's included) when a woman accidentally exposes a leg as she boards the tram, and her skirt gathers tightly to shape a most un-Victorian bum. Lartigue's sunbathers may or may not be aware of his camera, and that is the point. As critic Luc Sante wrote in his afterword to the book, "our very speculation on the matter itself [is] an additional voyeuristic seasoning." As cameras became smaller, the watchful eye entered the most private sanctums to capture the most private of acts, as in Henri Cartier-Bresson's shaky picture (blame a quivering mattress I suppose) of a Mexican couple entwined in bed. Bruce Davison's picture says more about the leering patrons than the stripper herself, a wry comment on the ludicrousness of voyeurism itself.

Luc Sante noted wonderfully that blackmailers and private detectives assigned to divorce cases -- the rogues of pulp fiction novels -- practiced the purest form of voyeuristic photography. Nowadays we have the paparazzi, who wreak havoc on the lives of celebrities with their telephoto lenses in order to titillate the masses. The picture of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in an adulterous clinch in Italy spawned a scandal, two divorces, threats of excommunication from the Vatican, and happily for Liz, two weddings to Dick. Jackie Onassis' bikini photo taken in Skorpios Island was the precursor to her infamous topless sunbathing pictures, which caused legions to cry foul and Hustler publisher Larry Flynt to laugh all the way to the bank.

Behind every voyeuristic image is an anxious photographer in cloak-and-dagger mode, wracked by anxiety, the thrill of the kill, even ethical conflict. The high pressure (and oftentimes illicit) moment can result in blurry and unusually framed pictures. Behind Velio Cioni's image of a Roman brothel is a photographer shooting from the hip as he lurks in the shadows, fearful of being caught.

One can almost imagine the photographer shushing the dog as he snaps a picture of its mistress' resplendent rump. Larry Clark, in his book Tulsa, chronicled the intimate lives of his teenage subjects as they spiraled through angst, sex, drugs and guns. His subjects were totally complicit and allowed Clark to take his revealing and often graphic images of them. But in the picture on the right, Clark keeps his distance, an unusual choice for him, and lends the image a decidedly voyeuristic and illicit quality.

Perhaps no other body of work deals more squarely with the subject of voyeurism than Japanese photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki's The Park. In the 1970s, Yoshiyuki prowled Tokyo's public parks with his camera, flash and infrared film to capture the nocturnal and clandestine sex, both gay and straight, that took place on the park grounds. The controversial series, which was exhibited at the time underground and at one point almost destroyed by the photographer, gained renewed interest more than 20 years later after being championed by critics and other photographers.

A curious aspect of the park phenomenon are the spectators who lurk like predators behind bushes to spy on the couples, and sometimes force themselves into the action. Yoshiyuki takes as much interest in this act of voyeurism as the actual sex that is taking place, a photographic voyeur stalking sexual voyeurs.

Finally, a post about voyeurism will not be complete without an image of a woman getting dressed while she is spied upon from the proverbial keyhole.








Unknown, Untitled, circa 1910.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Couple entwined on a bed, Mexico, 1934.
Jacques Henri Lartigue, On deck of Dahu II, Bibi and Denis Grey, July 1926.
Bruce Davison, Stripper, California, 1965.
Marcello Geppetti, Liz Taylor and Ricard Burton, Ischia, Italy, 1963.
Settimo Garritano, Jackie Onassis, Greece, 1970.
Velio Cioni, Brothel in Via Mario de'Fiori, Rome, 1958.
Roswitha Hecke, Airport, Zurich, 1979.
Larry Clark, Untitled, 1972.
Kohei Yoshiyuki, From The Park, circa 1970.
Unknown, Untitled, circa 1951