Exposed – Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera,

We’re all familiar with the endless talk of Big Brother Britain, but do any of us really know how much we are being watched and the part that we play in creating this uneasy atmosphere? This is the question at the heart of Tate Modern’s new exhibition. Tracing the history of the unseen photographer this show illuminates our understanding and fascination with voyeurism, while prompting us to contemplate the real price of exposure.

This is a mammoth exhibition and to fully appreciate it you should set aside the best part of an afternoon. Sprawling across fourteen rooms it is divided into five sections that undertake a staggeringly ambitious examination of invasive looking. The scope is vast and the attention to detail remarkable in a survey that takes you from the nineteenth century to the present day.

There is something inescapably troubling about many of the exhibits. Photographic technology may have changed over the centuries, but our edgy relationship with the viewing and making of images has remained the same and it is this that disturbs. Just how is privacy defined and are humans controlled or in control of the lives and behaviour they have so fastidiously documented?

Sex and death are an intrinsic part of the human condition and never cease to fascinate. The two sections on voyeurism and desire and violence consciously play with this and are the highlights here. Helmut Newton’s images transfix us with the avaricious nature of lust. A standout black and white print shows a woman sitting on a sofa gazing at the naked torso of a man. All we can see is his back and her fixed aggressive eyes. It is both a cunning subversion of gender roles and a brutally honest comment of the public’s insatiable appetite for sex as a sales tool.

What is so unsettling is that a number of these images are undeniably reprehensible, yet we feel compelled to gaze at them. The dark allure of violence comes under the spotlight in a sombre print of a body being fished from a lake. As we stare at the dark shadows of the faceless spectators we do so in disapproval, before realising that only the gallery and time separates us from being one of the morbidly curious mass. Likewise our darkest fantasies are fed by looking at men trying to rescue a figure from jumping from a bridge. 

The morally ambivalent stance reaches its apotheosis in an ingenious installation by Oliver Lutz depicting a public lynching in 1915. A black canvas hangs on a wall in front of a video screen. Only when the viewer stands between the two does he see his or her own image projected on to the horrific scene courtesy of an infrared video. To see your face superimposed into this carnage is truly shocking. You look on with horror, wondering what role you would play in the action if you had been there all those years earlier. Would you be standing there appalled or secretly delighting in this sinister unravelling of humanity?

If the section on surveillance with its portrayal of warzones seems an anti-climax, this is only because the rest of the exhibition is so electrifying. The final room which shows how hours of surveillance footage are processed is overly technical, even if it does raise pertinent questions about the distinction between the human eye and a machine.

The majority of visitors will feel much more at home in the section on celebrity. The sensational images of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor at the height of their affair in Rome encapsulate the public’s gleeful fixation with glamour and sex. Yet in front of these lies a case containing newspaper cuttings of Diana Princess of Wales’s death. And it is in this kind of juxtaposition that the triumph of this show lies. In a split second you can turn around and your mood will be altered as you face the reality of a voyeuristic world underpinned by menace, which deep down you know you have played part in creating. It is uncomfortable, but essential viewing.

Exposed – Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera, Tate Modern, London, until 3 October.