For a long time in the past, human beings contemplated their own reflections in the still water of the lake, in glass, mirrors and metal surfaces, until one day we turn and see moving images of ourselves on surveillance monitors in real time—in shops and restaurants we frequent or even the convenient store right around the corner. The last time I had this experience was only a few years ago at a multimedia exhibition in an art museum. Through digital screens, the culture of surveillance has torn down the old order of the social space and opened up a new possibility, a new social collectivity in which the individual can be either the object or the subject of surveillance. As a medium that contains both public and private images, the surveillance monitor is a visual synopsis of the complex relationship between power and viewing in postmodern societies.
Starting from the surveillance society we are living in today, the 3rdBeijing Photo Biennial points to the complex coexistence and interplay between the social, public and private characteristics of photography, providing a platform for us to reconsider the role of the image in challenging the tension-filled relationship between the public and the private as well as its influence. Before the curatorial team chose to respond to the aforementioned issues with a new curatorial logic, the most basic and urgent point on the agenda was to look back at the history of photography and today’s cyberculture; in order to pave the way for the critical aspect of the biennial, we need to investigate the ways the boundaries between the public and the private are constantly shifting under the influence of visual mechanisms, history, culture, science and technology, etc. and how it is shaping our everyday life in return.
The invention of photography has an innate connection to spying and surveillance. Geoffrey Batchen mentioned in his essay “Guilty Pleasures” that long before the invention of photography, there were already suggestions that “a room-sized camera obscura be erected in Glasgow for the permanent surveillance of the passing population.” [1] In the late 19thcentury, the mass marketing of detective cameras disguised as everyday objects (watches, ties, canes, wallets, etc.) reinforced the role of photography as a tool for spying and surveillance. When it comes to photographic practices in general, debates and doubts surrounding the invasion of privacy as a result of street photography and snapshots have never ceased; many European countries have legislated laws concerning photographing in public early on, setting boundaries between the private and the public in photography through legal means.
With the continuous development of photographic technology, history and culture, many photographers have tried to change the ways they shoot in order to counteract photography’s inborn reputation as an invader of privacy. The works of photographers such as New Objectivity artist August Sander, US Farm Security Administration photographer Walker Evens and Diane Arbus, who presented her work at MoMA’s “New Documents” exhibition in 1967, changed the way images are produced in the public sphere to a certain extent by presenting subjects who are seen looking directly into the camera in their photos. At the same time, other photographers have tried to open doors to even more private spaces with their cameras. Since photographers of the “Boston School” (represented by Nan Goldin) entered the view of the public collectively with their portrayals of intimate relationships, boundaries between the public and the private in photography are constantly being redefined. Eating, sleeping, lovemaking—details of family life that used to be considered extremely private are now made public through photography and have become topics for discussion in the public domain. Starting from private homes, photographers have extended their investigation to semi-public, semi-private domains and even completely private spaces; abandoned factories, research & development laboratories and secret weapon test sites have all become subjects photographers are trying to reconstruct. Meanwhile, private, collective and social issues that were seldom discussed before are now widely explored through photography, which opens up a space for free thoughts.
In more extreme cases, some artists have attempted to challenge our perception of the public and the private directly. In “Untitled” (1991), American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres put a photo of an empty double bed he made after he had lost his lover to AIDS up on a billboard. In “Suite Venitienne” (1980), Sophie Calle tailed a stranger she accidentally ran into in Paris and followed him to another country. In “Stranger” (1998-2000), Japanese photographer Shizuka Yokomizo wrote to strangers and arranged for them to appear at open windows with the lights on at the appointed time in the evening for her to photograph. These works were created before or at the onset of the era of the Internet, and they foretold the dawn of a new epoch in which public and private images would coexist.
In the past 20 years, issues related to new means of image production and dissemination, surveillance and power in the era of the Internet, live streaming and the gaze of the public, Internet security and data breaches have caught many artists’ attention. They are constantly exploring and reflecting on the relationship between images and the public & the private through media such as photography, video, text, installation and performance. In “Untitled” (2003), American artist Andrea Fraser recorded her sexual encounter with a collector in a hotel room and turned it into an artwork, which opened complicated topics such as institutional critique, gender politics, privacy protection, etc. for public discussion. In 2016, Chinese artist Xu Bing edited more than 10,000 hours of security footage into a 90-minute drama film titled “Dragonfly Eyes”, which led to a wide public discussion on the society of surveillance we are living in today.
In this year’s biennial we start with the issues discussed above. Though not enough to cover all the artworks presented in the exhibition, they have laid the foundation for the curatorial team’s construction of the biennial based on different “constellations”. Building on this foundation, we attempt to combine the central topic with curatorial ideas such as history vs. the present and the center vs. the peripheral in order to explore new possibilities for approaching complex issues with curatorial practices.
He Yining
[1] Geoffrey Batchen, “Guilty Pleasures”, p.1 (originally published in CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, eds. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). For more thoughts on surveillance and photography from the early days of photography to the age of contemporary art, please see Geoffrey Batchen’s book More Wild Ideas: History, Photography, Writing(p. 255-281 in Chinese edition published by the Chinese Nationalities Press for Photography and Art, 2017)
