Guilty pleasures

In the essay Guilty Pleasures, from which the quote at the top of my blog comes from, Batchen discusses artists and authorities’ preoccupation with observation and surveillance through the medium of photography. In his writing there are two more quotes I will discuss with relation to my project.

“According to the Philadelphia photographer of 16th October 1886 ‘it(hidden cameras) can do more mischief than its weight in dynamite, or more good than its weight in gold, according to the disposition of the person who pulls the string’”

This statement in particular I find very interesting in relation to a discussion on surveillance as it neither tries to condemn nor justify the use of photography for surveillance but acknowledges both its potentials. One of the main concerns of my project is not the legitimacy of CCTV surveillance as a practice but the way in which it is applied. It seems that there is no transparency when it comes to those who implement it and more worryingly no need to prove its necessity nor effectiveness to those whose privacy it sacrifices.

“The average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify. Of course you and I know that this unbounded faith in the integrity of the photograph is often rudely shaken, for, while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph. It becomes necessary, then, in our relation to the truth, to see to it that the camera we depend upon contracts no bad habits”

Although I feel the first statement in this quote is somewhat untrue, in the context of discussing specifically CCTV footage from which I took it I believe this is a common problem. With the public being familiarized with the aesthetic of CCTV footage through Hollywood films such as enemy of the state and through television programming such as crime watch; subjects portrayed by cameras designed for the surveillance of criminals become guilty by association. Any action which is out of the ordinary becomes suspicious regardless of its legality.