The very title of the show “Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera” promises intellectual and aesthetic excitement and indeed other rather less elevated pleasures. Yet in this large—overly large—exhibition, these great expectations soon wither, giving way to bleakness. The very word “exposed” is ambiguous, and this ambiguity has led to the muddled assembling of quite disparate photographs, linked only by a metaphor.
Street photography, from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century with the invention of the small, hand-held, concealable camera to the sensitive contemporary work of Julie Foreman, has little in common with voyeurism and surveillance. The subjects may not know that they are being photographed but they are merely portrayed as they are, quite openly leading their everyday public lives. They have nothing to hide, nothing to feel embarrassed about, and nothing secret or untoward is revealed. The photographer’s purpose is that of an artist, to find subjects who are not self-consciously posing, to depict social life as it happens, and to find and create abstract patterns of shape and shade.
One of the best examples of street photography in the exhibition is Ben Shahn’s Post Office, Crossville, Tennessee (1937) which records for us the dress and facial expressions of the crackers and the small-town businessmen of that rural state. He has cleverly given them depth by capturing their reflections beside his own in the large plate glass window of the post office, the place where the action was in town. Shahn’s Main and Court