The twentieth century was the century of visual desire par excellence. The media that visually defined the twentieth century are photography, film, and television. All three are based on looking, on the curiosity and fascination of looking as the crucial impulse. The century seemed to want to once and for all prove that visuality is “the origin of all endeavors and fantasies to expand the human senses”¹ and also that it is “proof of the inextricable connection between aesthetics, eroticism, and creativity.”² At the beginning of the century, Sigmund Freud described a child’s interest in observing the sexual act of its parents as the (actual or fantasized) primary scene, which decisively influences our later desires and wishes, our pleasure, ability, and will to knowledge, and aesthetic, erotic, and cultural practices. In fact, with this he reinforced how primordial, how “natural” the sense of sight is. Today Meyers Lexikon Online writes of the term voyeurism: “Voyeurism: [ … French voyeur “viewer,” to voir, from Latin videre “to see”] scopophilia, the divergent sexual behavior (above all of men), in which sexual excitement and satisfaction are reached through secretly observing physical nudity, stripping, or sexual activity of unknown people. Voyeuristic tendencies in sexual behavior are widespread. According to S. Freud, voyeurism represents a fixation, closely connected to exhibitionism, with an isolated partial drive, which also involves problems with gender identity and the physical self-image.”³ In Meyers Großem Taschenlexikon from 1983—twenty-five years earlier—it is more clearly a question of “sexual perversion.”⁴ Where does the hesitation, the bashfulness, the qualifying tone come from when we speak about the idea of the voyeur?⁵ While in the middle ages, maidens and landscapes were still “a feast for the eyes” and one gave the “eye” when one flirted, in the last century the positive, or at least neutral, notions of the viewer, of the voyeur as a person who looks with curiosity, were restricted to the negative notion of a person who looks out of sexual perversion, who “abreacts” by looking. Volker Roloff (co-editor of the symposium catalogue Die Ästethik des Voyeur (The Aesthetics of the Voyeur) finds an initial basis for this in the discourse on psychoanalysis, which not only further developed considerations of voyeurism, but also pathologized it. Yet he adds that we are all biased when confronted with our own visual curiosity, we want to recognize its creative potential: “Preferably we leave it to actors, artists, painters, theater or film directors to give form to our desire to look and to reflect on it,” and we are happy if a work is judged to be not voyeuristic.⁶ He finds a second explanation in the Christian disdain for senses and sensuality, which were regarded for centuries as tools for sin. This disdain was above all for the eye and for the tongue: “The so-called concupiscentia oculorum belongs to a tradition that understands notions such as lust and desire, volupté, désir, curiosité as a priori negative.”⁷

We can follow the development of the concept of the voyeur from the practitioner of a primordial, visual curiosity to a forbidden gaze, a perverted drive to look. In a paradoxical twist, from the Christian ban on sensuality, the desire to see emerged from the sum of the senses and developed into the dominant sense in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Concurrent with the condemnation of visual curiosity, we have the development of the telescope, microscope, photography, film, television, Internet into omnipotent devices and media for discovery, capturing, and mediating. All of these instruments reinforce our sense of sight, our desire to see, and the range of visual possibilities. Restrictions on sensuality seems to boost the sense of sight (above all other senses), and a ban on looking seems to further strengthen desire. Roloff continues: “The desire to see is…not at all an external sense; it is rather always turned inwardly and outwardly at the same time. It is the origin and générateur of an imaginary world of images, of images that are culturally codified, remembered, fantasized, and dreamed, images that direct and constitute all perceptions.”⁸ Accordingly, the opposition between the subject and the object of voyeurism is precisely as questionable as the division between the spirituality and sensuality of sight and between reality and imagination. Despite all attempts at proscription, we can assert that sight is primordial, sight is imaginary, and accordingly, it is uncontrollable. That is the quintessence of the past two hundred years (annoying, punishable voyeurism is another topic). 

In its 170-year history, the medium of photography has developed from a cumbersome instrument into a super convenient instrument, becoming an elegant catalyst for seeing. Progressively smaller cameras, stronger telephoto lenses, higher resolution “night vision” reinforce sight, discovery, and the (analogue or digital) capturing of situations and events in every corner, in every hiding place in the world. Photography is a distinctively voyeuristic medium. It is at its very foundations voyeuristic; even without the viewer’s gaze, before the photographic conflation of distance to proximity from the posed to (in the snapshot) exposed (in the snapshot), from a dignified reproduction to a pornographic depiction. Looking through the lens corresponds to looking through a hole in the wall (as presented in Untitled by Henri Cartier-Bresson, for example) and the play between phallic desire and the vulva as the disappearing point in the psychological dimension. The connection between the optical concentration of the gaze and the observational attitude of “partaking without consequences” are as much an attribute of the observer of photography, of the photographer, and of photography as a medium: the voyeur of the voyeur of voyeurism. Voyeurism is a “fulfillment of the eye’s desire from a distance,”⁹ and in this form of play the voyeuristic gaze and the aesthetic gaze are joined.

We are not only attributing a voyeuristic impulse to photography in the sexual realm. The voyeuristic gaze looks for indiscretion, the overstepping of private or conventional boundaries set in the profane or sacred. Paparazzi photography, for example, depends exclusively on the voyeuristic power of photography, on the media that distributes it, and on the voyeuristic pleasure of the viewer. We also characterize as voyeuristic extreme close-ups of murder victims and revealing images of the ill, both being brisk and intrusive glances into the private sphere. If the photographic gaze more intensely focuses, hones in, constricts and excludes increasing complexities from the field of sight and thought, then it develops into a pornographic gaze.

A showcase example of voyeuristic photography in the usual, erotic, sexual sense of the word is presented in the work of Helmut Newton: his photographs function first of all directly, simply, almost functionally. He presents his motifs—mostly young, attractive, “sexualized” women; before a dim, heavy background, they flash out of the darkness. Many of his pictures are dominated by a stark black-and-white contrast: certain things are harshly lit, while others disappear into darkness. The principle of photographic voyeurism requires this alternation from dark to light. The voyeur classically sits in darkness, security, becoming more and more fevered through gazing upon the illuminated scene. It fits this aesthetic well that the flash lights up the forbidden and secret playground of the rich and beautiful. The object jumps out in a 250th of a second and enflames the voyeuristic desire of the observer. The abundance of black underscores the forbidden, the crime that the photographer and the protagonist are engaged in—even if it is just the offense, the luxury, of actually having time for sexuality—and opens up space for all kinds of projected ideas. This situation contrasts to the fact that, in Newton’s photography, those caught in the flash are never alarmed by it, they do not react to it, but rather continue doing what they want to unperturbed. In this way and on a second level, Newton undermines his own pretense at reality and produces an ambivalently dazzling world of images: his realism transforms into a symbolism. 

In several photographs, however, the creator Newton made voyeurism itself the topic. He called them “Studies on Voyeurism”: for example the scene in a lofty palace hall adorned with ornate silk wallpaper, heavy curtains, and rich carved wood furniture. In contrast to all this splendor, a man films a woman in the foreground. Concentrating, he stands stiffly bending over her, while she stretches out in a strenuous back bend, offering herself to the camera. He is dressed, she is naked. He films, she shows herself and is viewed. The complementary two figures form an isosceles triangle. Along with all the other details, the two give the impression of being connected like Siamese twins for the moment in which the activity takes place. A striking image of the interdependence of voyeurism and exhibitionism.

Another example is a close up, an extraordinarily direct photograph. A voluptuous woman, as usual, poses only an arms length from the camera. She looks past the camera, presumably into the eyes of the almost invisible man. Her dress hangs half open and is being adjusted by a man’s hand so that her breast is free and in the center of the picture. She appears to be “in between,” in limbo: her body offers itself to be viewed; yet her attitude appears slightly undetermined. Through the many small details and references that fill out and direct the picture, it is constructed in such a way that the viewer looks from the position occupied by the almost invisible protagonist with his camera and his penis. Looking and photographing are presented in this image more than anywhere else as explicitly sexualized: “Le regard est l’érection de l’œil” (Jean Clair).¹⁰

In Self-portrait with June and Models, Vogue Studio, Paris 1981 Newton sets off a firework of references and oppositions. Newton is dressed, “overdressed,” in his half-opened (peeping Tom) trench coat, white tennis shoes, and twin lens Rollei; the model, seen directly from the back with her front reflected in the mirror, poses nude except for her black high heels; in supporting roles: June, his wife, dressed in everyday clothing, unexcited, even slightly bored; and a hidden model, of whom we can only see truncated legs and feet in extreme stilettos. Who is where in this picture, and where do we stand as viewer? The model’s crotch marks the exact middle of the picture. Through the reflection we learn that, as the photographer, Newton stands invisibly at the point where we are located as the viewer. We gaze with him from within the backdrop, out of the staged scenario into the everyday world from which June looks back at us. As a photographer looking into his viewfinder, Newton—and we along with him—becomes a voyeur; yet the voyeuristic tension is dissipated by the regular lighting and June Newton’s gaze: the enigma of the scene is revealed and deconstructed. “It is not the figure of seduction that is mysterious, but rather that of the subject in capturing his own wish or image.”¹¹ With these words, Jean Baudrillard consoles the voyeur (viewer) disappointed by the light and dissolution. A somewhat unusual disappointment. More usual for the voyeur, but also much tougher, is being discovered while watching, when the woman, the object of his desire, looks back at him and turns his own weapon on him, beating him at his own game. While the voyeur secretly acts like a thief when he watches, the woman consciously uses her gaze as a weapon.¹² In Helmut Newton’s Big Nudes from 1980, for example, strong, tall naked women use their gaze to remove the voyeuristic viewer from his role as an uninvolved participant.

Valie Export plays with this element in Genital Panic, a sequence of photographs from 1969 in which she appears as protagonist. By doing so, she breaks with the classical distinction between masculine activity and feminine passivity. Like an activist from a resistance group—the Black Panther Party, for example—she poses in tight pants and jacket, wild hair and machine gun. At the same time, she shows her pubic hair and vagina. The (male) gaze is compelled to flit about—shifting between looking at and looking away, between taking hold and rejecting. The voyeur is confronted by an aggressive stare, the object becomes subject.

Postscript: The counterparts to voyeurism are forms of exhibitionistic behavior: showing, presenting, offering of sexuality, stripping, revealing the genitals to the camera, to the public. A sex theater for private or for the theater. (By this, I do not mean exhibitionism as a way of spreading horror of the genitals). The secret of discovery, of looking without being detected falls away here. It is replaced by presentation, by a private and public dialogical postulation, which connects the one who offers and the one who looks for a certain moment in time. Together in shared arousal (or through professional acting) they build up a sexual tension through the sense of sight. As part of a series, Jean-Luc Moulin’s work Noeska, Amsterdam, 2004 intervenes in this context. His double portraits of women who simultaneously hold their faces and their vaginas in an almost cramped way deals with the animal and the civilized, the personal and the general, the ego and the id as an entirety that must be lived and conceived of together and not separately.