{"id":8416,"date":"2021-09-26T16:11:44","date_gmt":"2021-09-26T20:11:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/?p=8416"},"modified":"2021-09-26T16:11:46","modified_gmt":"2021-09-26T20:11:46","slug":"when-does-surveillance-art-cross-the-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/2021\/09\/26\/when-does-surveillance-art-cross-the-line\/","title":{"rendered":"When Does Surveillance Art Cross the Line?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

BY\u00a0BARBARA POLLACK<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

September 9, 2014 9:30am<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Published in ARTNews<\/p>\n\n\n\n

New Yorkers\u00a0Martha and Matthew Foster<\/a>\u00a0are furious with photographer\u00a0Arne Svenson<\/a>. As residents of the\u00a0Zinc Building<\/a>\u00a0in Tribeca\u2014a glass-clad residence whose interiors can be easily observed from the street\u2014the Fosters were shocked when they found depictions of their children in Svenson\u2019s latest series,\u00a0\u201cThe Neighbors.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0For these color-saturated images, the photographer used his telephoto lens to catch glimpses of his neighbors, without their consent, as they napped, watched television, snacked, cleaned up, and otherwise went about their business within their apartments. According to the Fosters, Svenson is nothing more than a Peeping Tom, invading their privacy and exploiting their profiles for commercial gain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The couple sued the photographer in May 2013, but the trial court dismissed the case, finding that it didn\u2019t represent a commercial appropriation of the plaintiff\u2019s image but was instead an artistic expression protected by the First Amendment. Currently, the case is back in court on appeal, although New York case law is clearly on Svenson\u2019s side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did Svenson, a renowned fine-art photographer represented by Julie Saul Gallery<\/a> in Chelsea and Western Project<\/a> in Los Angeles, overstep his bounds when he picked up his camera and filmed the comings and goings of private citizens? Or are the Fosters, who chose to live in a glass box in the middle of a dense urban setting, naive and ignorant of the history of photography?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Arne<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

There is no law that prohibits people from looking into one another\u2019s windows in New York City, where many denizens own telescopes and binoculars precisely to indulge in this pastime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what is the difference legally between looking at people or places and producing a photograph that is distributed and displayed in the public arena? And does any of this matter today, when Facebook, selfies, and NSA data-gathering have expanded access to personal information to the point where many believe we are witnessing the death of privacy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the past few years, a number of photography exhibitions seem to have anticipated the case of Foster v. Svenson in their examinations of voyeurism, surveillance, and privacy issues. As early as 2003, the\u00a0International Center of Photography<\/a>\u00a0presented\u00a0\u201cStrangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0a survey that included many examples of photographic invasions, and in 2010 the\u00a0San Francisco Museum of Modern Art<\/a>\u00a0presented\u00a0\u201cExposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, the Transformer Station<\/a> in Cleveland is showing \u201cUnknown: Pictures of Strangers,\u201d<\/a> the New York Public Library<\/a> is planning an exhibition scheduled for November 2014 titled \u201cPublic Eye: 175 Years of Sharing Photography (1839\u20132014),\u201d and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art<\/a> is planning \u201cCovert Operations: Investigating the Known Unknowns,\u201d<\/a> scheduled to open in 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI discovered that as soon as you had a camera small enough to hide, you got surveillance photographers,\u201d says SFMOMA curator Sandra S. Phillips<\/a>, who cites Paul Strand<\/a>, Walker Evans<\/a>, and Garry Winogrand<\/a> among those who caught subjects off-guard or unawares. \u201cSome photographers didn\u2019t think they were being invasive; they were just attached to this view of looking at people through a little peephole and seeing what the world looked like when people weren\u2019t posing for the camera.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Certainly, Svenson doesn\u2019t view himself as doing anything invasive. \u201cBeing a photographer, I shoot what I see, and I am what I see,\u201d he says. \u201cI looked out the window of my studio and I saw this fascinating amalgam of Mondrian, Hitchcock, and Vermeer, and I had to photograph it.\u201d Wanting to create a study of humanity rather than specific portraits of people, he avoided depicting faces or other identifiable details when shooting \u201cThe Neighbors.\u201d \u201cI thought, how can I represent humanity without specifically identifying the human being? They were representations of you and me in our most human moments,\u201d he says. \u201cI was looking at a certain kind of quietude.\u201d Indeed, nobody knew who was in the photographs or even the location of the shoot until a news report tracked down the building and the residents themselves broke their anonymity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Likewise, Michel Auder<\/a> wasn\u2019t thinking so much about spying when he trained his video camera on nearby apartment buildings and created the footage for Untitled (I Was Looking Back To See If You Were Looking Back At Me To See Me Looking Back At You)<\/em>, 2014, his three-channel video installation presented at the 2014 Whitney Biennial<\/a>. Watching the films, the viewer becomes, in effect, a character in Hitchcock\u2019s Rear Window<\/em><\/a>, peering into lighted apartments on high floors. The subjects were filmed from enough of a distance that their features, and therefore their identities, were obscured. Still, it is easy to see their actions as they come home at night, undress, watch television, and make love. The video, however, is not quite as explicit as Merry Alpern<\/a>\u2019s 1993\u201394 series \u201cDirty Windows,\u201d<\/a> in which Alpern photographed through an airshaft leading to a makeshift brothel in New York City.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"TKTK\"
Michel Auder<\/a>\u2019s Untitled (I Was Looking Back To See If You Were Looking Back At Me To See Me Looking Back At You)<\/em> (still), 2014.\u00a9MICHAEL AUDER\/COURTESY OFFICE BAROQUE GALLERY, BRUSSELS AND GALLERIA FONTI, NAPLES\/COLLECTION OF THE ARTIST<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI am an uneducated anthropologist. I am in one spot everyday, and I make observations from what\u2019s around me,\u201d says Auder, a veteran filmmaker. He shot the buildings featured<\/a> in his video from the 20th floor, from an apartment in which he lived for over a year. \u201cI don\u2019t think of myself as a voyeur,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you want to make a film about wild animals, you go where they drink water every day and place yourself so they don\u2019t see you. Is that voyeuristic? It\u2019s the same for me, though I am observing the activities of humans.\u201d Auder is well aware that the creep with a telephoto lens is a cultural stereotype, but he insists, \u201cI am no more a pervert than you are, but if you use a camera, you have to look. I don\u2019t know how to escape this. What else can I do?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Case law is on the side of artists like Svenson and Auder. The \u201creasonable expectation of privacy\u201d is not absolute, and it is governed, in many instances, by statutes. In New York State, the right to privacy is narrowly construed to apply only to situations in which a person\u2019s likeness is used without consent for advertising or other commercial purposes. The First Amendment has long exempted news organizations from such constraints, allowing them to photograph people without their permission so as to illustrate news stories. As the court found in Svenson\u2019s case, works of art have been extended a similar privilege, permitting artists to exercise their freedom of expression without the need for prior consent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a leading case, Nussenzweig v. diCorcia<\/a>, photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia<\/a> was sued by an Orthodox Jew who was disturbed to see his portrait\u2014a close-up shot in Times Square in 2001\u2014included in the artist\u2019s series \u201cHeads.\u201d The case was ultimately dismissed because Nussenzweig had waited too long to file suit, failing to meet the statute of limitations. The court, however, used the opportunity to reaffirm the photographer\u2019s right to capture people without consent, even when using their image goes against religious strictures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much has changed since 2001 when diCorcia set up his tripod in Times Square. The rise of the Internet has unleashed a tidal wave of privacy violations, with people voluntarily posting personal pictures online and companies like Facebook and Google presuming to license and distribute them. More important, in the aftermath of 9\/11, there has been a surge in government surveillance, most recently the NSA\u2019s stockpiling of metadata. In this situation, a \u201creasonable expectation of privacy\u201d no longer seems to exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBecause of the proliferation of public surveillance cameras, you can\u2019t help being aware that you are being recorded by a camera, just by walking down the street. You have no idea who is collecting this information or how it is being analyzed and how close the analysts tracking you are,\u201d says ICP curator Christopher Phillips<\/a>. \u201cSurveillance is so pervasive that the attitude among 20-year-olds is almost blas\u00e9,\u201d Phillips notes. \u201cThey have grown up entirely in the digital era and have no concern or even awareness of the legal or ethical dimensions of this privacy issue,\u201d he adds. \u201cTo them, privacy is not something that you can expect or should expect.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A key factor that is contributing to this \u201cdeath of privacy,\u201d Phillips observes, is that Facebook and other Internet companies now assert the right to possess all of the material that users post online, including photographs. \u201cYou and I are part of the transitional generation that has memories of legal and cultural battles around privacy issues,\u201d Phillips points out, \u201cbut a younger generation is unaware of those rights that are quickly wearing away in a digital culture. They think of the loss of privacy as just a price you pay for being connected to a digital network.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To underscore how troubling this situation is, many artists are using tools of surveillance and loopholes in privacy laws to create works that expose just how much has been lost. Paolo Cirio<\/a>, for example, created a project called Street Ghosts<\/em> in 2012, in which he tracked down pictures of random individuals who had been captured by Google Street View. He then printed them as posters and placed them at the very spots where the original images had been taken, injecting life-size representations of unsuspecting citizens into the landscape. According to Cirio, he did this to bridge the gap in people\u2019s thinking about the difference between online and offline reality. Some people reacted negatively to the project, posting comments on the artist\u2019s website. Others, however, asked Cirio to turn their Google Street View moments into life-size portraits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Paolo
Paolo Cirio<\/a>\u2019s No. 20 Berlin\u2014Dircksenstrasse, Rochstrasse, Germany<\/em>, 2012, from the artist\u2019s \u201cStreet Ghosts\u201d series.COURTESY THE ARTIST<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe worry about being naked on the street, but we don\u2019t worry about being naked on the Internet,\u201d says Cirio. By the same token, he notes that people are guarded about sharing information with strangers on the sidewalk, but seem comfortable posting personal details online. \u201cI think there is still something called privacy, but we don\u2019t have a dialogue about cultural norms around this issue on the Internet,\u201d he says, adding that there are few laws governing Internet privacy, even as major companies seek greater access to personal information. And with lobbying clout to back these corporations up, it is unlikely that new laws will be passed to curtail this activity. Alternatively, just as individuals are relinquishing their privacy, businesses and government agencies are building walls to defeat intrusion. This lack of transparency was the target of Cirio\u2019s latest project, Loophole for All<\/em> (2013), which involved him hacking the Cayman Islands accounts of 200,000 offshore companies and allowing visitors to his site to open their own Cayman Islands mailboxes. \u201cIt is really important to determine where and when we need full transparency and where and when we need privacy,\u201d the artist says. \u201cThese two things are going to change the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the story about Edward Snowden broke and the classified documents revealing government surveillance of millions of phone records and e-mail accounts were released, artist Trevor Paglen<\/a> experienced mixed emotions. For nearly a decade he has been \u201cwatching the watchers<\/a>,\u201d which was the title of his project<\/a> earlier this year with Creative Time<\/a>. For this work, Paglen photographed the NSA headquarters and two other secret intelligence agencies and distributed the images online. Hearing that the NSA was gathering widespread information, he felt that \u201cit was a confirmation about things that many people had strongly suspected.\u201d He adds, \u201cI went from being sort of a conspiracy theorist to having a recognition of reality.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alert to the fact that surveillance is inherently secretive, Paglen has worked to give literal visibility to the government\u2019s growing encroachment on individuals\u2019 privacy rights. \u201cThese agencies seem very abstract,\u201d he says, \u201cbecause we don\u2019t have images to help us make sense of what they are, and I assume my job as an artist is to generate images that help us see what we are living with.\u201d By contrast, in creating his projects, he acts entirely aboveboard, even getting government permission to photograph the sites he chooses. He is concerned that because the government\u2019s way of collecting metadata seems so abstract, most people were unable to understand the implications of this form of intrusion until the Snowden revelations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Trevor
Trevor Paglen<\/a> photographed the National Security Agency as part of series commissioned by Creative Time<\/a> Reports.VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Turning the tables on the \u201cwatchers\u201d in the U.S. government by photographing their secret facilities and intelligence agencies is one way that Paglen tries to balance the scales. \u201cPart of living in a democracy is that people get to know the maximum amount about the government, and the government gets to know the minimum amount about the citizenry\u2014that\u2019s how the balance of power is supposed to work,\u201d Paglen says. \u201cMy job as an artist is to traffic in images and to see the world; I don\u2019t do policy work. That is not my job.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Source: https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/privacy-and-surveillance-art-2628\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Summary: The notion of privacy is an interesting and complex issue and pertains directly to the concept of remote monitoring. These artists have the mindset that what they can see from the street is available for use in public art. This gets into privacy issues as they take pictures through people’s home windows. The article also discusses how people are protective of their information with strangers on the street but are quick to share personal details online. The author also brings up how younger generations have a more lax idea of privacy having grown up as digital natives. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BY\u00a0BARBARA POLLACK September 9, 2014 9:30am Published in ARTNews New Yorkers\u00a0Martha and Matthew Foster\u00a0are furious with photographer\u00a0Arne Svenson. As residents of the\u00a0Zinc Building\u00a0in Tribeca\u2014a glass-clad residence whose interiors can be easily observed from the street\u2014the Fosters were shocked when they found depictions of their children in Svenson\u2019s latest series,\u00a0\u201cThe Neighbors.\u201d\u00a0For these color-saturated images, the photographer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":8417,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-8416","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8416"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8418,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8416\/revisions\/8418"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}