The Public Eye and the Citizen-Voyeur

Photography as a Performance of Power

Bibliographic Data

ID12347166
AuthorsPaul Frosh (0000-0002-4813-074X, corresponding author)
Year2001
Volume11
Issue1
Pages43-59
Publication date2001-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial Semiotics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1035-0330 • E-ISSN: 1470-1219
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10350330123316
OpenAlexW2054453912
LanguageEN
Citations received24
References cited19

This paper argues that photography is best grasped not as a medium of visual communication, but as a manifest performance of the power to make visible. As such, photographic practices are central to the experience and demarcation of private/public boundaries in advanced media cultures. In the private domain, photography is both a ritualized domestic activity and provides conventional and definitive representations of the domestic. These functions are ostensibly opposed to photography's role in the public realm: the same visual technology becomes, in the mass media, both the index and agent of publicness itself, with the paparazzi−especially in the aftermath of Princess Diana's death−symbolizing the violation of the private. The paper explores the ways in which photographic performance at the public/private boundary dramatizes power relations through forms of social transparency, voyeurism and memoralization. It also asks whether momentary crises in the dominant scopic regime can provide the basis for alternative ‘uncanny’ visual practices that are tenable and empowering

Aesthetics · Art · Media studies · Photography · Political science · Power (physics · Public domain · Realm · Sociology · Transparency (behavior · Visual arts · Voyeurism · History · Law · Photographic and Visual Arts · Photography and Visual Culture · Psychology · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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