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(Re)exposing the naked body: The misuse of surveillance

cameras in Spencer Tunick’s photography event
 

Hille Koskela

Abstract

The photo which relates to my paper is from Spencer Tunick’s photography event in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Spencer Tunick is a photographer who’s become famous for his pictures that feature large numbers of nude people posed in artistic ‘landscape’ formations in urban space. His nude project started out in 1992 in New York and since then he’s been shooting in numerous cities all around the world.

In March 2006 Tunick took pictures of about 1700 naked people in public urban space of Newcastle. After the event there was an unusual misuse scandal. It was found out that local surveillance camera operators had been printing ’surveillance camera stills’ from the shooting scene. These pictures of naked people were subsequently ‘for sale’ in local bars and pubs.

This misuse of surveillance strikes hard against the aims of the photographer. Tunick’s projects argue against ’social sorting’ – discrimination, sexism and racism – against the commodification of the naked body, and aim to make human bodies ’disappear’ in the landscape – to form ’a surface of skin’. People who participate generally agree with these aims and arguments. It can be argued that Tunick uses exhibitionism (the willingness of thousands of people to expose themselves) to criticize voyeurism (the commodification and exploitation of the human body).

What happened in Newcastle was clearly ’misuse’ of surveillance as conventionally understood (invasion of privacy). However, it also undermined all the essential points of the art project by bringing social sorting and discrimination into a project which specifically aimed to argue against them, and by separating particular individuals from the landscape (as surveillance conventionally does). The misuse meant (re)commodifying the body and (re)exposing those who originally wanted to expose themselves for particular reasons.

Beyond the empirical case discussed, my paper aims to contribute in developing a ’post-disciplinary’ approach to surveillance theory. Tunick’s projects seem to fall into a category of empowering exhibitionism (Koskela 2004). People deliberately place themselves visible in order to ’reclaim the copyrights’ of their own lives, or in order to criticize the ever more commodified uses of images. There has been a pervasive ‘crime prevention versus privacy rights debate’ in surveillance studies and, hence, the performativity of seeing, showing and being seen has largely been left aside (McGrath 2004). The use of concepts such as exhibitionism and voyeurism can replace the old debate. If we expand our thinking beyond this ‘crime control vs. privacy’ reasoning, we will be able to grasp a deeper, much more detailed and sophisticated picture of the changing meaning of images and representations.

REFERENCES

Koskela, Hille (2004). Webcams, TV shows and mobile phones. Empowering exhibitionism. Surveillance and Society, 2:2/3, 199–215. www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles2(2)/webcams.pdf

McGrath, John (2004). Loving Big Brother. Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space. Routledge, London.

* Duo, Vidiot, .