At a time of ever greater digitization and real-time surveillance, our world looks less like that of Bentham or even that of Orwell’s Big Brother, than that of Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Where once Orwell’s 1984 reigned supreme as an example of surveillance culture, we’ve now moved through JenniCams, MTV’s Reel World and „Big Brother“ the reality TV Series, into the real-time control regime manifest at the Tampa Bay Super Bowl of 2000 and the on-going control at Zürich’s international airport, among other places. Leaving the JenniCams aside as personal promotion or on-line pornography and a commercialization of self-surveillance, we find ourselves in a world of data, a meta-narrative.
Innumerable government agencies and corporate entities track us for various purposes—„to protect us“ or to market to us—and permit the creation of massive data banks that fuse „private“ and „personal“ information. We are automatically always already inscribed in a situation where „They“ know, not just who „we“ are, but also what we buy, where we’ve been, with whom we’ve talked, and with whom we’ve slept. The last freedom, that of the bed, has long been penetrated.
We’ve been scanned, scammed, and searched for years. Data from our transactions, personal and public—from airports, ATMs, credit card purchases, cell phone and internet connections, or, increasingly, by simply passing through public space, walking or driving down a street has already been processed and analyzed. The erosion of privacy is a foregone conclusion. It’s all but „gone, daddy, gone.“
Any time you go to a Stop and Shop, pass through a T-Station or parking garage, or merely in front of an ATM or traffic camera—not to mention any number of other myriad cameras that watch over our streets, that simple fact and the accumulated data are assembled into a great searchable data bank. Whether you are to be sold by some marketer or are to be arrested by some government agency, or, also increasingly, if your otherwise innocent demographics are sold to some marketer somewhere, you are already shopped.
What happens, though, if some or all of these data are wrong or falsely correlated? What if „They“, whoever they are, put together a completely false narrative? What if these data are merely co-incidental or falsely processed? Well, if you are found at the wrong time at the wrong place, have the wrong name or wrong skin color, your number is up.
Enjoy. Be afraid. Or both.
Bill Kouwenhoven
Susan Berstler: email
Artists probably admit to obsessions more readily than those who chose certain other professions. The past few years, I have been indulging in two specific crazes simultaneously – one a fascination with Coney Island and the second a desire to capture what you feel, experience, smell, remember when taking a photograph rather than simply that what you see. In pursuit of this later obsession, and despite its ridiculous cost, I have been shooting infrared slide film. It records heat rather than light and can transform a dark and gray subway platform into a world of wondrous blue shadows. This image was taken about a month and a half after 9/11. I’ve always thought that it hinted at the tragedy, the state of mourning and shock that the city had been plunged into. Yet to me it also shows the beauty and magic that was and still is New York and its people. The Patriot Act and the subsequent hostility shown with increasing frequency by officials of more city, state, federal departments than can be mentioned towards photographers in public places, threatens my ability to capture such images.
: email
The concern of my work is the relation humans have with themselves, with each other, with nature, and with our fabricated world. Different from the act of painting, which I primarily pursue, photography can offer a way to gain insight into existing patterns of form, color, and light. The medium also provides a way to highlight energetic correlation. With the camera phone, a pretty inconspicuous and instant device, I’ve been noting moments where I feel especially attuned to context, to my place within a larger whole. It is a kind of experiment with joining; it is less about recording observation than it is about more actively participating in a scene through which I move. The pixilated results of these images – illegible objects, reduced color, warped patterns of light – make sense when seen as accounts of circumstantial motion. Could the desire to immerse in a setting and retrieve information be viewed with suspicion? Sure! It also reveals implicit, not always apparent, connection.
Charles Daniels: email
As a photographer I have long been interested in images of communal space. As a portrait speaks of an individual, photographs of people interacting with each other, particularly in public areas, hint at the stories that make up communities. My images portray the often-temporal moments I encounter as I wander with a camera. Some of these images are local, many were taken while traveling. The myth is that you travel to other places to learn about far away people and cultures. The truth is that travel informs you about yourself. As a photographer I have the tools to show the viewer not just where I have been but also hint at my experiences there. For me a photograph is not just about composition and light but also capturing and preserving a moment. I feel that my photographs are best viewed in a series -- individual moments juxtaposed with one another, sometimes in support of each other, sometimes in contradiction. My photographs express the world that I encounter -- joyous, serious, sad, silly -- in all of its complexities. Since 9/11 I have been increasingly approached, confronted and harassed while taking these photographs and many others like them.
Karen Davis: email
My photographs are part of a single document -- a visual journal. In my journal, scenes from city streets mix with public interiors and private spaces. Informal portraits mingle with the anonymous actors that I cast in the drama of a moment’s glance. From my journal I select images that contribute to the personal and social narratives I construct.
Although my approach has not changed since 9/11, there is a new voice in my head suggesting a reversal of roles. I am on the street finding my subjects, but it is I who is being watched; it is I who is being spied upon. While I photograph in both black and white and color, my black and white images seem to reflect that voice in a film noir drama that bounces between my subject, the unknown all-present observer, and me.
Gary Duehr: email
These photographs, derived from publicly available satellite pictures on the Internet, demonstrate a kind of extreme voyeurism. Anyone, anywhere, at any time, may be documented as they drive to the grocery store, water the front lawn, or grab lunch downtown.
The people glimpsed here and there—from a top view, at the resolution of half a dozen pixels, mostly denoted by the shadow they throw—become forlorn, ghostly figures. And the landscape they inhabit, seen from the air, appears as a desolate array of buildings, cars and streets, much like a Monopoly board.
Tinted sepia, with pixels creating an impressionistic feel, the images balance nostalgia against scientific survey. Questions of homeland security and insecurity are raised. Do we feel safer, or merely more fearful, from knowing that our whereabouts can be pinpointed to within seven feet at any given moment?
Don Eyles: email
Explorer or spy.
I'm never furtive. roaming the pits and girders, often at night, in day-glow vest and hard hat, tripod over my shoulder, two cameras that shoot 6x9 cm. negatives slung around my neck. Iíve been to the tip of the Zakim Bridge north tower, and to the hazy battlefield under Fort Point Channel where crews struggled to plug the blow-out that occurred in September 2001. In the Ted Williams tunnel with the ventilators off, I heard a tugboat passing overhead. I like the kaliedescope of intermediate states that arise as the project progresses. Often I never see a soul, but if there's a work crew, I greet them and make sure I won't be in their way.
My photos are on the Big Dig website. The engineers love them because they glamorize their profession, and because I sometimes succeed in catching the engineering nuances. Several were used by the team that built the Fort Point Channel tunnel when they entered an international competition. I have made around 6000 images since 1993. I think I'm a boon to the history of Boston and to the science of civil engineering. But I have done this project with absolutely no official credentials..
Bill Kouwenhoven: email
This selection of work from four cities and of four people plays upon the possibilities that surveillance implies. Who are these people? What are they doing here in Texas, here in Moscow? When did they pass through Mannheim and Berlin? What have they seen, who have they met, and what are they planning?
They seem so suspicious, these men. Doubtless there are digital profiles on them. Certainly other narratives have been created that explain them. Yet here, in these four pictures, from these four cities, there is nothing to be read as fact. It is an assemblage, a montaged-up narrative, that takes advantage of our tendency to see all cats as dark in the night and to seek the comfort of an easy explanation—a familiar narrative-- whether it is of people (two, three, four?) randomly out after dark or members of the CIA or Al Queda meeting for undetermined purposes. Why are these pictures together? Who is analyzing them? Is it for our safety or our destruction? Who knows? It’s all mysterious and completely subject to (mis-)interpretation, as are all data.
Frank Tadley
The image isa tale about the life of a traveler post 9/11.
It speaks to the vanishing point we all face in this complex time called modern life. Sometimes I run toward that point and other times I run away. But there is no security in either direction. Only a sense of despair and frustration at what we are doing to others and ourselves in the name of country and security.
The image is at Logan airport..
V Van Sant
The first time I rode through these desolate tank fields I knew I wanted to take pictures here. On weekends the area seemed barren and isolated. During the week I imagine this place must be a steady migration of trucks, dropping off and picking up goods and then taking them away again. Different size and shaped tanks loom mysteriously everywhere, secretly holding who knows what inside. Finally August 2004 I had my camera and was able to shoot these "drive-by" images (as a passenger). Before 9-11 I thought this was just another surreal little part of Boston (two large colorful murals add to its weirdness). There doesn't seem to be much security here and no one is around. Now I think, "What if some of these tanks were blown-up, or if they contained food, what if it was poisoned? What if…" Suddenly my intriguing Charles Sheeler-like industrial area had become a playground for terrorists. Nondescript white vehicles appear out of nowhere, gray stormy clouds adding to the sinister possibilities. I guess even the fact that I was snapping shots out of the car as it whizzed by could have been consider suspect. I didn't stop to find out.
Margaret Weigel: email
My images were taken inside a commuter rail train departing from North Station in the winter of 2004, and dialogue with both the act of photographing in the hybridic space of the train, and the subjects of the photographs themselves.
After the 9/11 attacks, there's a heightened sense of discomfort for MBTA passengers. But while safety announcements and public safety information are broadcast regularly, there is no one around to defuse any potential dangers. My images in part reflect how, in this post 9/11 world, we have all been deputized as undercover agents; we grow paranoid and watchful for the good of the nation. In one of the images, a newspaper obscures a man's face: what is he trying to hide? In another, a woman looks at me: is she the guilty party, or is it me? A funny package lies to her side: what's inside? And then I am the one covertly snapping pictures. Surely, I cannot be up to any good.
The colors in the images are distorted both by the train's fluorescent lighting and digital manipulation to portray the experience as one grounded in subjective perceptions, not documentary 'reality'.
James Zall: email
"My experiences with 'security restrictions' on photography have involved not official authorities but private security guards. Private companies are increasingly (and implausibly) insisting that security reasons allow them to forbid photography of (or even near) buildings that are plainly visible to the public, from public property. Some have claimed that they're entitled to take my film because it has images of their buildings. If property owners succeed in deterring picture-taking of even unidentifiable parts of buildings and equipment, such as are shown in these images, they will have accomplished yet another private encroachment on the public sphere.
I must admit, however, that these specific images were not taken under challenge by security guards. I tend not to do my best work while someone is trying to grab my camera."
