Voyeurism is a term in psychology describing: “[…] a practice in which an individual derives sexual pleasure observing other people engaged in sexual acts, nude, in underwear, or dressed in whatever other way the “voyeur” finds appealing.”
According to Krafft-Ebing, voyeurs are “men who are so cynical that they seek to get sight of coitus, in order to assist their virility; or who seek to have orgasm and ejaculation at the sight of an excited woman”
Japanese photographer Kohei Yoshiyuk presented the extreme example of voyeurism in art. He created a series of photographs called “The Park” where he photographed couples engaging in public sexual acts. He focuses not just on the couples but also on peeping people who creep up to watch. He presents the “voyeuristic photography” in the most extreme edition highlighting human’s fascination with “looking”. He also emphasized that photography is voyeuristic in its form.
“To photograph the voyeurs, I needed to be considered one of them”, he has said. “I behaved like I had the same interest as the voyeurs, but I was equipped with a small camera. My intention was to capture what happened in the parks, so I was not a real ‘voyeur’ like them. But I think, in a way, the act of taking photographs itself is voyeuristic somehow. So I may be a voyeur, because I am a photographer.”
Voyeurism describes a mode of looking related to the exercise of power in which a body becomes a spectacle for someone else’s pleasure, a world divided into the active “lookers” and the passive “looked at”. (Wells, 2015)
Andreas Kock’s ‘Stalker’
Andreas Kock is a Swedish fashion photographer who draws his inspiration from cinematography “sex and women in themselves”. “Stalker” is a provocative series, which was originally created as fashion editorial. The photographs are highly staged. The vantage point gives the impression that the photographs were taken from the outside and the subject matter is not aware of it. When we look at the images we enter the sublime world were we are the voyeurs.
Michael Wolf ‘The Transparent City’
Michael Wolf is a German photographer focuses on capturing life in mega cities and offers an intimate view of people’s lives in towering skyscrapers. Wolf has got an extremely good sense of composition what he masterly applied to his images. Every shot is carefully thought out and intresting in its form. The meaningfulness of his photography is very clear and “[…] emphasizes the conceptual underpinnings of his ongoing engagement with the idea of how modern life unfolds within the framework of the ever-growing contemporary city.”
“[…]his photographs of Chicago look through the multiple layers of glass to reveal the social constructs of living and working in an urban environment.”
“Wolf discovers a rather mundane loneliness in his windows — people staring into computers or gazing at television sets or napping alone in armchairs. Many residents seem numbly isolated in sterile, generic boxes of rooms suspended in the sky away from any kind of grounded reality.” (LensCulture)
LensCulture. The Transparent City Photographs by Michael Wolf. [online] Available at https://www.lensculture.com/articles/michael-wolf-the-transparent-city [Accessed on 20th November 2016 at 22:20]
Wells, L., (2015). Photography: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge.
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