Tourist Magazine

It has to be said that, for such a large and mainstream institution, the Tate Modern has never been particularly shy about addressing the controversial. Whilst its older sister across the river, Tate Britain, languishes in dull crowd-pleasers like the recent Henry Moore retrospective and the frankly atrocious-looking Rude Britannia, the powers-that-be at Tate Modern have decreed that their biggest summer draw should be an unsettling and pessimistic exploration into the darker recesses of the photographic impulse. And fucking bravo to them for that.

The exhibition begins innocuously enough (if we ignore the multiplicity of signs reading ‘CONTAINS MATERIAL THAT MAY BE CHALLENGING TO SOME VIEWERS’ dotted around) with the exploration of ‘The Unseen Photographer’. The first room contains images from Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s 2000 series Heads, which manage to be beautifully framed and lit despite being taken by automatic, hidden cameras and flashes on the streets of New York. The second and third rooms carry on the theme of photos taken from afar and without the subject’s knowledge, including a glass cabinet full of gently eccentric curios from the early Twentieth century such as a camera concealed inside a shoe, or a walking cane, or a pocket watch. So far, so tame. By room four, however, things are starting the slow, sticky slide into something more threatening. The ‘Celebrity and the Public Gaze’ section attempts, with some success, to deconstruct our fascination with celebrity culture – and our obsessive attempts to document every aspect of their lives. The celebrities in these photos are no longer human – they are public property. We want to know them, to live vicariously through them, or to witness their destruction. It is here that the notion of the voyeur truly begins to take off and live up to its nefarious reputation, with pieces such as Alison Jackson’s staged ‘paparazzi’ photographs, which are actually posed for by professional celebrity lookalikes, highlighting just how much we love to see a celebrity in their rawest, most unflattering and weakest moments. We wish to drag them down to ‘our’ level, and we are willing to do this by force.

From the moment we crane our necks to see Marilyn Monroe’s underwear onwards, it becomes increasingly difficult to look whoever it is you’re with in the eye (for my part, I went with my mother. I don’t recommend this.) We are led through the gamut of sexual perversions and forbidden glimpses through parted curtains, including a strange collection of blurry snapshots which, according to the handy-dandy blurb below, were taken for research purposes by the Institution For Sex Research at Indiana University. One has to wonder what these people would think if they knew their sex lives had been captured for posterity and rigorously studied, not as part of some middle-aged man’s extensive partnership with his own left hand, but in the name of science. Really, is this any less of an invasion than a photograph taken by a lonely pervert with a long-lens camera? Is it any more morally excusable? I don’t know, maybe people should just stop having sex near windows.

The climax, if you will, of the florid genitalia and seedy press of flesh on display comes with ‘The Park’ series by Kohei Yoshiyuki, whose infra-red photos of young couples having sex in parks, unknowingly surrounded by men who creep up on them and attempt to ‘join in’ the fun without being noticed (this is considered a ‘sport’ in Japan), are displayed backlit in a dark and cramped corridor to a splendidly excruciating effect. (The original exhibition had the series displayed in a darkened room, with viewers given flashlights and forced to seek out the photos in the lecherous manner of their subjects.)

From sex, as always, we move to death, and the delightful spread of causes thereof. The photos are fairly rammed in here, from grainy sepia depictions of lynching’s, lurid suicides and the brutal aftermath of the electric chair, the atrocities pile up and up until it is no longer possible to consider the misshapen bodies as ex-humans. Once again, the camera reduces its subjects to fleshy objects, a sequence of meat to be viewed from a certain angle. The detachment is hammered home by Oliver Lutz’s installation piece and highlight of the entire exhibition, ‘The Lynching of Leo Frank’, where a CCTV camera records an infra-red image of you, the viewer, looking at the concealed image of the lynching of a black man. On turning round to see the TV screen set up behind, our first reaction is not oh, a lynching, how awful, but look, it’s me, on a screen.

Emerging blinking and wobbly from this visual assault, we are then left to stumble through the jarring and ill-fitting Surveillance section, which is certainly interesting, but represents a frankly baffling decision of curation, seeming mealy-mouthed and reminiscent of a polite BBC investigation in light of the depths of (in)humanity we have just spent the past hour rubbing up against. I can only assume the Tate intended this room as some kind of palate-cleansing sorbet before it spits visitors out into the gift shop – a shame, because taken on its own, the room is actually an interesting and thoughtful examination of surveillance culture in our society and contains some genuinely haunting images.

In the end, then, Exposed is a challenging and queasy gem of an exhibition which largely works to inspect the lower recesses of the human condition. If you’re in the mood to plunge your face into the moral vacuum of human desire without having to trawl the darker corners of the Internet, go forth and take your fill.

Sophie Hanson