Stolen Moments
People caught unawares, by painters imagining private moments and by photographers working with hidden or unnoticed cameras.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Stolen Moments are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Some pictures seem to catch people who do not know they are being watched. Painters could only suggest it: Johannes Vermeer's women reading letters are wholly absorbed, and Edgar Degas's pastels of women bathing in the 1880s crop and angle the view as though glimpsed through a doorway.
The camera made the stolen moment real. Paul Strand fitted a false lens to his camera to photograph New Yorkers unobserved, as in Blind (1916), and Walker Evans hid a camera under his coat to record passengers on the New York subway between 1938 and 1941. In Tokyo in the 1970s Kohei Yoshiyuki used infrared film to photograph couples in night-time parks and the voyeurs creeping toward them. Around 2000 Philip-Lorca diCorcia lit passers-by in Times Square with hidden strobes for his series Heads. Such work raises lasting questions about privacy and consent.
Related artists
More in Subject Matter
Suburbia
Surveillance
Symbolic Composition
Talismanic
Technology
Text
The Abject
The Afterlife
The American West
The Art Market
The Artist's Studio
.jpg%3Fwidth%3D960&w=3840&q=75)
The Body
The City
The Domestic and Domesticity
The Elements
The Environment
The Fantastic
The Mundane
The Seasons
The Senses
The Sublime
