Story and photo by Delaina Haslam, le cool London 'Exposed' is not one to take your grandparents to, which is why I took my parents instead. Actually, they took me, and are perfectly equipped to handle the content of this exhibition in any case. At least as much as anyone is, or so I thought. This is what happened on our visit; and when I returned to catch the reactions of other visitors as they exited. I was hoping for gasps and exclamations of alarm. I got learned, measured and in-depth responses. This is Tate Modern after all. So, no outrage, but I did get some reservations and a walkout. Here's why: 'Exposed' is controversial – at certain points in the extreme. It sets out to explore “pictures made on the sly, without the explicit permission of the people depicted”. It begins with 19th- and 20th-century photographers such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia who captured their subjects unawares, and moves through the themes of celebrity, desire, violence and surveillance. Helmet Newton's flawless-finish quasi-pornography rubs shoulders with Kohei Yoshiyuki's exposure of a phenomenon he discovered in a Japanese park, where people attempt to creep up on couples making out in the bushes, and touch them without being noticed. Documentation of suicides and people jumping from burning apartment blocks give way to wartime surveillance footage and artists' responses to surveillance, such as Denis Beaubois' 'In the event of Amnesia the city will recall'. My mum was saddened in the early rooms, as “most of the people in the pictures are now dead, and they were unaware that they were being photographed”, which brought to mind something Andy Warhol once said: “Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details.” We don't like people looking at us – or things that represent us – when we do not know that they are. As I progressed through the exhibition, I found myself increasingly alone, that is, not in the company of my parents. While I indulged in morbid interest over newspaper cuttings about the deaths of President Kennedy, Princess Diana and death row prisoners such as Ruth Snyder in 1928, I sensed their interest dwindling. On reflection, they told me that they found the exhibition ill-conceived, trying too hard to explore too many aspects of surveillance, making it hard to take. It needs editing to make it smaller and thus have more impact. I decided to return to the Tate a few days later to collect people's reactions as they came out of 'Exposed'. “The best thing about it was the Nan Goldin stills from the film 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” Erika, a history of art student, told me. “I thought that was really moving.” But she identified an omission: “I really thought they could have included an artist called Dash Snow, who does temporary Polaroids of his life on the streets of America. He died recently; he would’ve been a really good choice.” “It was quite overwhelming to be in a space with so many works of such history,” said Warren, who was visiting from Monash University, Melbourne.” I had to pause for breath a few times…It oscillated between being very in-your-face, with some seminal pictures of the Vietnam war, and work from contemporary art history, like Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s work. Putting them together, made for a weird sensation.” Some visitors did not react so well to the exhibition's breadth. Moshe from Israel told me: “I think there are too many pictures. So many things, it’s impossible. So we left.” His wife, Daniela, agreed: “It’s overwhelming because it’s about so many subjects, not just sex – it's about crime, violence and also about war. Maybe it’s in how they present it – it hasn’t got one line which we can follow to know what the exhibition is about.” Voyeurism and surveillance could have made two separate exhibitions. The uniting theme is 'invasive looking', but what jars is the fact that the aims of the furtive photographer and the surveillance camera are very different; being asked to bracket them makes for an unsettling experience, leaving us feeling cheated by the sheer scale and lurching scope of the subject matter, while, at the same time, we are
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