VOYEURISM - PERSPECTIVES LECTURE
Voyeurism
noun
- the practice of gaining sexual pleasure from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity.“Internet sites dedicated to the act of voyeurism”
- enjoyment from seeing the pain or distress of others.“township visits are bordering on voyeurism”
Voyeurism is the act of watching a person for pleasure, typically sexually however this is not always the case.
In a modern society, `voyeurism can be explored through the act of ‘stalking’ someone’s social media profile, whether that’s someone you went to school with 10 years back or someone you currently work with. As humans we have a drive to be nosey at others’ lives for satisfaction - and we don’t even know why we do it? We are all guilty of searching through someone’s profile, finding out what holidays they have been on, their relationship, what they get up to; and this sheer fact of knowing what that person gets up to actually gives us a small sense of satisfaction, peering into somebody else’s life.
Pictured above are images taking by Merry Alpern in her series ‘Dirty Windows’ illustrating the happenings in a window across from her Wall Street apartment. Alpen set up a secret camera aimed at the window of a room harbouring drugs, sex workers and strippers. Her secretive voyeuristic imagery is opposed by many due to it’s controversial aesthetic of spying on those in the nude. Despite this, her work makes it into many museums.
