Surveillance, Voyeurism and Scopophilia: The Expansion of Public Space

Anna Novakov: Private Dicks: The Detective in Art and Popular Culture

I am going to give a capsule, historical overview of some of the issues involved in talking about city space and how we get to where we are today in terms of surveillance. I will start in the mid-nineteenth century, which was the model that twentieth century cities are based on. Traditionally, cities have always been spaces for men, inhabited primarily by men. Women who were part of the middle or upper classes in ancient Greek or Roman cities stayed indoors most of their lives. The courtyard was the space for women, the street was the space for men. Until the mid-nineteenth century, respectable women who wanted to go into the city could only do so accompanied by an escort. Most of the time, they only went from one house to another.

This model of the city lasted well into the nineteenth century, and started to shift because of a major development: the department store. This was a space carved out of the city in which women could congregate, being finally able to leave the domestic space of their houses.

It was a carved out feminine space within the masculine urban area. The mass production of clothing also contributed to this process, since it stimulated homogenization. Prior to that time, it was very expensive to have a dress made, and it was easy to tell one's class and social status by one's clothing. Once mass production was developed, clothing became less expensive and more readily available, creating greater ambiguity. Women began to infiltrate the space of the city, and this was important in establishing the terrain in which we now live. The department store was a contained, protected interior space, like the city but also controlled, like the shopping mall today. Early department stores were vaginal looking. If the women were going to come out of their houses, they needed to be protected, and the shopping arcade answered that need. This has been written about beautifully by Walter Benjamin and Susan Buck Morse, in a book called The Dialectics of Seeing: The Arcades Project.

Another problem that arose by that time was an influx of women from the countryside looking for work in the cities. A lot of them had economic problems and were uneducated. This led to a rise in prostitution in the major cities of Europe, and later in New York and Philadelphia. This was seen as problematic for the body of the city. Not only did the department store introduce women's desire for objects into the urban space, but there was also women's sexuality infiltrating the streets. The word "streetwalker" comes from this: a woman who walks the street, outside her house, where she is supposed to be. It was felt that women's sexuality was getting out of hand. All women were thought to have the potential for prostitution. If women were on the street, they might be hookers. As a result, the paranoia of being caught in the street by a wild, nymphomaniac woman developed. Public spaces started to be seen as having an element of danger.

Other inventions made a difference, such as street lights, which made night time more accessible. More light meant more people, and more women who look ordinary but are in fact prostitutes. In the mid-nineteenth-century there were newspapers in New York that published sketches picturing prostitutes who looked like ordinary women, suggesting that one had to be on one's guard against them. By this time, the scientific analysis of prostitution had become a hot academic subject. Prostitutes and other women took up the position of gentlemen and started to go out into the streets in carriages, instead of being escorted by a male family member. At the same time, the idea that certain public places were seething dens of barely suppressed sexuality took hold. Any woman who worked in a bar or cafe was suspect of being, at least occasionally, a prostitute.

The history of art shows that there was a preoccupation with sexuality and prostitution among nineteenth-century artists as well. One of the ideas artists were dealing with was the notion of the passive observer. How do you locate yourself so you can look at something objectively without being part of it? This also had its roots in the scientific model, with its ideal of objectivity. If you look at paintings like this, you can see the artist is coming in from the street, he has the window open. Paris is outside. He is fully clothed. The young beautiful girl on the bed is exposed and asleep. He is able to observe, retaining a connection with the street. There is a sense of delight in his voyeurism. We, too, have a delight in that: indeed, this is one of the major principles of pornography.

In this painting, the position of the viewer is interesting. It is assumed to be that of a gentleman. The woman pictured is not looking back at us, but a little bit away. She is behind the bar and can't escape; we can look at her. The counter works as a proscenium. Other women in this category are sales girls, shop girls, coat check girls, or anyone who works in a cafe. Moreover, in Paris during this time, cafes were frequented by prostitutes on breaks, bringing yet another layer of sexuality to those places. The brothel too was a matter of concern by that time. Degas was obsessed with this topic. The contained space was similar to that of the harem. Dance halls were another dubious space in terms of sexual structure. From the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, all these images can be seen in terms of looking and not looking back.

By this time, the prototype of the ideal man comes in the guise of the flaneur, a type of gentleman that men aspired to be. The flaneur was able to observe the city and not be taken in by it. His stance rarely worked, but was held up as an ideal. One of the major proponents of flanerie was Charles Baudelaire, whose girlfriend, by the way, was a hooker. He wanted to be a flaneur. He pushed the position of the impartial gentleman observer, who was able to penetrate the city street without being controlled by it. The flaneur is often depicted as a gentleman of leisure_ he doesn't have to work, and can be on the street looking at all times. He is often presented as someone observing so much that it is almost scientific. Here he can be seen looking with binoculars. This model becomes extremely important as we move into the twentieth century and see it evolve into a more modern version.

At the same time, there was also an enormous amount of interest in the detective camera, which were miniature cameras meant to be used by the flaneur to enter the city space and secretly take pictures. They were kept hidden in places such as the inside of a gentleman's hat. While walking down the street, he could be taking photographs, gathering evidence to be scientifically evaluated later. These cameras became extremely popular, and took many forms, often hidden in clothing. Most were constructed for men, and only some for women. This is one of my favorites, a revolver or pistol camera, developed around 1870; indeed, the expression "shooting a picture" came from this time. This one has a very French style: someone decided that women needed a camera dress (I don't know if it was ever made). These inventions also illustrate the nineteenth-century fetishistic interest in body parts, an attitude which was fed by these cameras and can be found in literature as well.

There is a concurrent interest in physiognomy, which was a tool used in the nineteenth century to categorize criminals. It became popular as a pseudoscientific pursuit. If you could identify a criminal by his nose or eyes, you could analyze and decipher the street. There were hundreds of studies of ears, eyes, noses, mouths, in an attempt to link physiognomy and deviant behavior. This was appropriate to the model of the arcade. As a passive observer, you categorize people. At this time in New York, the police would identify prostitutes by placing their images on the windows of the police departments, often drawing huge crowds to look at the pictures. Another way in which they tried to control prostitution was by requiring prostitutes to be licensed, which is related to the earlier idea of women's sexuality as being out of control. Once on the city street, the city becomes chaotic. The urban space becomes sexualized.

In the mid-twentieth century, the image of the flaneur was overtaken by that of the private detective. The detective as a figure echoes the flaneur in an interesting way. I will be showing you some images from detective magazines from the 1940s and 1950s, many of which were popular handbooks on how to become a detective. The magazines always have a woman on the cover, a bad girl_ not the victim, but the perpetrator. They are presented in sexualized pictures, as deviants. The magazines were fiction, but people bought them anyway. The stories appeared to be truthful, but were fabricated, and in all of them women are in public places who were like black-widow spiders, looking for prey. Men must always be on the alert. There were ads inside the magazines on how to become a detective, which usually involved buying a kit. Often the kits included information on fingerprinting, or suggestions on how to present yourself in the city. The kits were offered for sale by the Institute of Applied Science. The detectives were always men, who presented themselves in a business-like manner. Television ultimately changes the venue for the detective. The favorite television programs are the detective shows, which feed the old desire for flanerie. It is the same old preoccupation in a contemporary form.

From the detective cameras of the 1870s to the detective fictions of the 1940s, we have developed contemporary surveillance, and a preoccupation with the ability to watch others all the time. The detective camera is still very popular today, often in the same form as in the nineteenth century, but now available as pinhole video cameras. Surveillance and surveillance cameras have been around for about fifteen years. Governments, corporations and private homes all use surveillance to try to control the environment. Now everybody is a detective; anybody can do it with the right equipment.

Lecture Notes

artist/prostitute

linguistic connection

commerce

division between the private space of the studio and the public

space of the gallery or street

Victor Horta

L'Innovation Department Store,

Rue Neuve, Brussels, Belgium, 1901

Destroyed in 1967. Iron and glass building. Related to Parisian store interiors. Art nouveau. Granite details. Three stories, divided horizontally into three bays.

Passage Choiseul, Paris

GUM, Department Store, Moscow

Kaisergalerie, Berlin.

Walter Benjamin, Ibiza, 1932 Photograph by Theodor Adorno

"During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well." -- from "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

E.J. Bellocq

Untitled 18, 1912

Henry Gerves, Rollas, 1878

window

public space/private space

commerce

home

as space for the spectacle of desire

mediating space between the public and the private

Hooking a Victim, 1851

Ernest-Ange Duez

Splendor, 1874

Prostitution Exposed, 1839

Edouard Manet

Nana, 1877

Belle of the Underworld, Queen of the Underworld, and Fast Women, Central Park

Edouard Manet

A Bar at the Folies Bergere, 1882

Andre Kertresz

Cafe du Dome, Winter Morning, Paris, 1928

Rented, 1878

Edgar Degas

Waiting for the Client, 1879

Brassai, Brothel, 1932

Edouard Manet

Cafe Concert, 1878

Robert Doisneau, At the Cafe Chez Fraysse, Paris, 1958

Physiologie du flaneur, 1841

Edouard Manet

Women Drinking Beer, 1878

Brassai, Dance Hall, 1932

Prostitute Health Certificate, New York City

Edouard Manet

The Plum, 1877

Robert Doisneau, Mademoiselle Anita, 1951

Paris Sketch, 1879

Pierre Auguste Renoir

At the Cafe, 1877

Pablo Picasso

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907

Sketches for les Demoiselles

Sailors in a Bordello, 1906

gouache and charcoal 25 x 19" Musee Picasso, Paris

Figures in a Bordello, 1907

india ink on cut paper, 3 x 3" Musee Picasso, Paris

Head of the Medical Student, gouache and watercolor, 23 x 18"

MOMA, NY

Medical Student, Sailor in a Bordello, 1907

charcoal and pastel, 18 x 25" Kunstmuseum, Basel

Medical Student, Sailor and Nudes, 1907

oil on panel, 7 x 9", location unknown

Excuse Me Madam, 1879

Scenes of Parisian Life, 1878

Eugene Atget

Man in a Carriage, 1900-1912

The Tarts, Paris, 1870 These Little Women, 1878

Physiologie du flaneur, 1841

Lee Friedlander, Baltimore, 1968

The Genius of Advertising, National Police Gazette

James Tissot The Young Lady of the Shop, 1883

Near the Boulevard, 1879

Eugene Atget

Corset Store, 1900-1912

doorway

as the passage from the public to the private

threshold space

Ben Shahn

Murfreesboro, Tenn, 1935

Eugene Atget

Hair Salon Window, Paris, 1900-1912

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, 1978

Eugene Atget, Prostitute, Paris, 1921

Eugene Atget, Window of a Ladies Store, 1900-1912

Eugene Atget

Maison de Tolerance, Paris, 1921

Eye from Strangely Familiar exhibition catalogue.

Surveillance Camera

Fritz Lang, Metropolis, film still, 1926

Scovill Detective Cameras, 1886

Hat Detective Camera, 1889

for sale in London at two guineas, with fitting.

Concealed Vest Camera, 1886

ad for conceiled camera

Detective Camera, Berlin, 1886

Early miniature cameras have names, such as Photographic Secret Camera, which suggest that people were excited by the idea of playing detective. The spy camera, shown here, made by Stirn of Berlin, comprises a round box which contains the film, and a button for taking the pictures.

Clandestine Photo Cameras, 1880-1890S

Miniatures for clandestine photography were a craze during 1880-1890s. Shown here are Grey's Vest Camera, 1886, Photo Cravat, 1891, Demon Detective, 1899, and Lancaster's Patent Watch Camera, 1894.

Pistol Camera, Geneva 1889

Also called an escopette. Camera made by Boissonas company. Takes kodak film.

Thompson's Revolver Camera, 1862

from the wet-plate era.

Camera Dress, 1890, Paris

Anthropometric Photos, 1884, Paris

The camera's value was recognized both in police work and in science. The pictures show the uses of photographic portraits of suspects. Alphonse Bertillon founded the world's first anthropometrical identification department at the Paris Prefecture of Police.

G.B. Buchenne

Expression of Passions, Paris, 1876

Arcades Photograph with Male Viewers

interior public space as a point of convergence between men and women

cafe

stores

brothels

spaces of transaction

Viewers at a Panorama

Anthony Pelissier

Meet Mr. Lucifer, 1953 b/w film

Film about an actor who performs in front of an empty theater while everyone is at home, watching television. He has a dream fantasy in which he meets the devil and his machine is the TV.

Electronics Store Display

Ads for Surveillance Systems

Covers of Popular Detective Magazines

Cover, The Stylist, 1947

Cover, Inside Detective Magazine, 1953

Cover, Confidential Detective, 1945

Cover, Uncensored Detective, 1951

Cover, Headquarters Detective, 1945

Detective Ads

The Types

Alert Detective John Siers discovered the telltale tire treads, 1951.

Mobster Abe Reles, 1951

Loot Queen, 1945

Fred Nicht, Killer, 1945

Rose Marie Birdsall, Murdress, 1951

Apartment House Manager, 1945

Child Stealer, 1945

15 year old Murderer, 1945

16 year old Murderess, 1946

She killed a 71 year old man with an ax.

Slip up, Co-Partner, Bouncer, 1945

Victim: Murdered Thelma Nicholas, 1945

Murdered Girl

Killer, 1953

Mrs.Helen Cromer

She gave investigators their best lead to the killer.

Evidence

Evidence and Clues, 1951

Found in the closet of a mailbox theft suspect. Small ax that bore suspicious stains. They were blood, the same type as the victim.

The killer who was trapped by a bloodstained switchblade knife. Victim's clothing gave no clue to her identity.

Jewelry Worn by Victim, 1945

Marcel Duchamp, Wanted/ 2000 Reward, Rectified Readymade, 1923-26

Andy Warhol

Most Wanted Men, 1964

Weegee

Mannequin surrounded

by a crowd, 1947

Adrian Piper, Catalyst, 1970

Vito Acconci, Following Piece , Chris Burton, Spy Case, Sophie Calle

Analysis by Trina Kyounghui Yi

Anna Novakov gave a capsule historical summary on city space. She began by stating that city space during mid nineteenth century became the beginning of interest of public surveillance. The spaces—the streets, cafes, saloons—were dominated by men. Women on the other hand occupied more domestic spaces. They were regulated to an enclosed space until a couple of significant changes occurred which opened other city spaces for women and allowed them to enter with ease. Department stores became a space for women—a carved out feminine space where they could leave their houses to go into these city spaces without escorts and without being disrespectful.

These stores were an idealized public space and yet a very protected space (emphasizing that these spaces were for women and therefore separation of public space continues). Another pivotal innovation was the mass production of clothing, as it created a homogenization of society. The class and status of women became not as easy to recognize. These societal changes were seen as more problematic than positive. Now the society had to find new ways to distinguish the good women from the bad.

Question: Did some of "good, respected" women demonstrate against the night street space being infiltrated by those undesirable women?

Novakov stated that this created an ambiguity, as women became indistinguishable. They infiltrated the public space, yet, became faceless among the unwanted, undesirable women—the prostitutes. This created another panic_ the preoccupation of sexuality. A flux of sexuality flooded the streets at night. Other public spaces (i.e., cafes, dance halls, ball rooms, coat/hat checks) became available for women to seek employment. These work spaces always portrayed women as contained and restricted by a physical barrier like a counter.

Question: Was this another form of societal affirmation of separating and/or segregating women from men with spaces and class?

Novakov then gave examples of the persona of a flaneur, characterized by the act of looking without being looked at in return. The samples included paintings by Degas and Manet, photographs by Cartier-Bresson and Picasso, as well as some cartoon drawings depicting the characteristics of a flaneur_ a man blending in with and unnoticed by the society. Today this act of looking continues in various forms and technologies. One of many significant technological advances in the twentieth century is the surveillance camera. These cameras are everywhere. They are present in the department stores, on the corner of Fifth Street and Broadway; they are on the front gate of so and so's house and they are held in the hands of many flaneurs.

Novakov suggested detective cameras as one of many forms of a flaneur and described their purposes including, but not limited to: invading public spaces, recording the unseen and suspicious, gathering evidence to prove and fulfilling the desire to look at something prohibited. Hence this gives the flaneur (whether the viewer or the camera) the power to view those guilty, vulnerable, or in control.

Question: How pretty women are usually pictured as being the jealous, naive, vulnerable but overtly sexual, and the "one who witnessed" is usually the stout and heavy middle aged women—another stereotypical assumption of the society?

Physiognomy which I believe is another practice of a flaneur where doctors and scientists with "big interests and good hearts" wanted to record and analyze those people viewed as being abnormal and deviant. As early as 1850's, Alphonse Bertillon documented the notion to help the current "deviants" and as a preventive "medicine," used physiognomy as a (pseudo)scientific tool to identify and categorize these "deviants" as suicidal, pick-pockets, etc., thereby ultimately segregating them from the public space into a space called asylum. Again, analyzing and dissecting therefore becoming specimen.

The society has eased itself into a chair where the looker can view (flaneur) without the person, place, or thing looking back at the viewer. The society has become a specimen that incorporates, provokes, challenges and exercises the act of looking. The flaneur.