Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera, Tate Modern

In the week that Sarah Ferguson was caught on a secret camera receiving a stash of $40,000 from News of the World journalists, Tate Modern launched this ambitious and excitingly diverse photography exhibition. Had the meeting been earlier, the incriminating images would have been perfect for the show. Instead, the Royal Family is spied on in Alison Jackson’s unusually generous parody, The Queen Plays with her Corgis.

Spread across 14 rooms, the collection holds over 250 still images and several short films, and includes work by legends from the early years and 20th-century icons (from Dorothea Lange to Robert Frank to Guy Bourdin), contemporary pioneers, amateurs and unknowns. They provoke surprise, shock, horror, smiles, giggles, sadness, fear, anger. And possibly even arousal.

The collection is divided between "Voyeurism" and "Surveillance", and sub-categories of unseen photography, voyeurism and desire, celebrity, violence and surveillance. Surveillance is an appropriate subject to include in a country with the most CCTV cameras in the world. Our current obsession with photographing and viewing each other on mobile phones, YouTube and reality TV is addressed in the catalogue essay by Tate Director Vicente Todoli, who asks, “Are we a society of voyeurs?”

Yes, but… on the other side of the lens, we are also being constantly observed. Voyeurism has always inspired photographers, and here exposes some surprisingly explicit 19th-century porn and documentary photographs which investigated early 20th-century American poverty using "hidden vest cameras". Lewis Hine’s illicit portraits of child factory workers dwarfed by machines could equally be of this century.

Throughout the exhibition, technological inventions enable new ways of peering and spying. A vitrine of cameras holds spywear including the CIA’s issue of black brogues with a camera in the heel, and a 1950s mini-camera of unmistakable Le Carré vintage. Equally useful for surveillance, long lenses transformed the voyeurist’s chances and opened up paparazzi culture. But they also led – and lead - to revealing, profound and interesting portraits of the unaware subjects. Harry Callahan’s subtly sensual close-up of the rear of a woman in a red dress (pictured above right was taken feet away and involved no connection between photographer and subject. In some hands, that’s a fairy step to stalking.

Walker Evans’ New York subway portraits taken by hidden camera (pictured right: Subway passengers, New York 1928), and André Kertesz’s close-up of Women Lost in Thought are poetic character studies. With Nan Goldin’s moving and pioneering documentary of family and friends, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (main image) presented in a dark room as a slideshow, definitions start dissolving because of her intimate relationships with the subjects and her presence as voyeur and participant.

In some ways, most photographers are voyeurs, driven by curiosity, but equally, many of their subjects by exhibitionism. The spectrum represented here spans peeping Toms, Rear Window-influenced observations, and paparazzi shots.  Playful and erotic, Kohei Yoshiyuki'sThe Park series (see below right) hangs in a darkened corridor and follows Tokyo’s young peepers crawling through grass to reach the sexually engaged young couples. Kohei joins them in what feels like a childhood game - until she’s close enough to touch.

More conventionally, Weegee went snooping on Coney Island Beach. With celebrities, voyeurism shifts to hunting behaviour and no one exceeds the insensitivity required than New York pap, Ron Galella, seen chasing Jackie Kennedy through a park. A sequence showing Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton sunbathing and kissing feels innocent and tender, but would the photographer have stopped if they’d gone further?

The section separating Surveillance arouses quiet attention and introduces some startlingly original approaches to subjects often hard to access. Aerial photography takes some of the focus away from the ordinary street shots from a balcony or roof – but those continue in corny Cold War street meetings and careless drug deals. But now the focus tends to be on military and state observation, depicted increasingly in abstract, artful compositions: Sophie Ristelhueber’s view of a Havana air force missile base resembles those mysterious, ancient imprinted patterns high in the Andes. 

And Simon Norfolk helped establish a new approach by documenting the US Army’s listening system and BBC World Service’s transmissions via the Ascension Islands in work which is entirely suggestive. Hair-thin strings of wire hang like gossamer in a grey sky – part of a sophisticated eavesdropping system, a typical Norfolk double-bluff technique which many  now also apply in the theatre of war after years of carnage fatigue.

Walking through this landmark exhibition, questions keep rising around privacy and freedom. Back in the street, I keep looking upwards, staring at the sides of buildings. But I also craved a hidden camera as I watched a couple kissing on the station platform.

• Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera at Tate Modern, London SE1 to 3 October