An exhibition questioning the evolution of photography and surveillance since the attacks on the World Trade Centre on 9/11 opens at the Musée national d’histore et d’art (MNHA) Luxembourg next Wednesday 5 April.
Portraits Under Surveillance is part of the exhibition series Looking for the Clouds — Contemporary Photography in Times of Conflict, a joint project of the European Month of Photography (EMOP), which launched in Luxembourg in 2006.
This exhibition not only evokes the surveillance and control measures introduced by the political authorities in order to fight terrorism after 9/11, but also their direct and indirect effects. The monitoring of any citizen’s movements, under suspicion or not, through photographic processes is linked to a vast storage of all types of data resulting from our daily life, whether travelling, shopping, relationships, working, or whatever.
Today, all public places are under video surveillance, particularly airports, train stations and department stores, but also cultural venues. Drones and mobile cameras, often invisible, are becoming more and more prevalent, both on a military and civil level. Face recognition, that is the identification and classification of individuals, is part of the daily routines of governments and private companies, and the subject of renewed questions in the United States, as the FBI’s use is accused of being “out of control”.
The works on display refer to the different aspects of this new type of photography and management of personal data that often reduces individuals to computerised information. The particular aesthetics of these images distinguished them from a classical ideal of beauty. Through their reduced and distant style, the photographs reject individual expressiveness as sought by humanist photography. The objective is to create a data model through the classifications of people and the schematisation of individual features.
The exhibition will run until 17 September 2017, and is open to the public between 10:00 and 18:00 from Tuesdays to Sundays. Entrance is free. For more information, see the Museum website:www.mnha.lu
Image: Helena Morrissey and Mark Carney by Daniel Mayrit
