There were two types of shock in the Tate Modern's new exhibition, Exposed: ... There was a visceral shock, seen with the images of a lynching, a man dying in the street and an execution in an electric chair (all within spitting distance of each other; an orgy of violence in which the first part of the exhibition culminates). And then were was a more insidious, moral shock. This occurs throughout; at the beginning with photos taken with hidden cameras, and slightly later with the celebrity pictures.
Either way, the exhibition is fundamentally about the voyeurism. The pictures are so shocking as they are taken illicitly, or are of illicit things. We are confronted with the dialogue between the pleasure and horror we get from looking at some of them. We are even asked to consider whether photography is itself an inherently intrusive medium.
But also, we have seen most of this kind of images all before. Just open up a classroom textbook on American history to seen lynchings. Broadsheet papers peddle images of death in the third world. For two quid we can ogle at exposed celebrities in Heat magazine. But their collective power in an art gallery is truly unexpected.
There are a couple of flaws we can level at the exhibition, but neither of these could be described as fatal. Firstly, it's pretty long. There are fourteen rooms in total, some of which are huge and others which contain a couple of dozen photos. Secondly, the last few rooms which focus on surveillance do seem somewhat superfluous. It's too much information, too much of an afterthought and, after all the shock and awe of the galleries before, an uncomfortable change of tack.
But by viewings everything which went before in the context of art deeply unsettles. Not only does it get us to question the artifice of photography, and how we view it, but it's a moral bludgeon. It could be described as overbearing and overegged, but I'm not sure how you can overstate the message. To me, it exposed a truly ugly side of human nature: the need to look.
