People Watching | Contemporary Photography since 1965
Ann Hamilton, Mirror, 2000, iris print. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine.
Written by Michael Galati
The activity of “people watching,” a conventional pastime involving the observance of everyday people doing everyday things, has taken many forms in its long history. It’s been an easygoing recreational activity for the laidback in public space, a method of surveillance for the clandestine, a practice of projection and mythologizing for the Piscean of us, and an ethnographic exercise for the more academic type.
The COVID-19 pandemic, with its social distancing and shelter-in-place measures and its historic social and racial justice demonstrations, has created a new form of understanding “people watching.” Above all, “people watching” is a way for people to be seen and heard, whether or not they know it. As such, there’s an implicit power imbalance in practice: the observed are unaware that they are being observed, and the observer can write any narrative they wish of them.
Zig Jackson, Crow Fair, Montana, 1991, gelatin silver print. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. 2011 © Zig Jackson, Crow Fair (KneelingWoman), Crow Agency, Montana
During the pandemic, however, when no one was supposed to be seen by another as a matter of safety, the power dynamic unexpectedly turned. Those who have not historically been seen or heard demanded visibility, championed their voices, and continued the long history of rewriting the narrative written about them. As a result, ways of looking, or put differently, perspective yielded with power, became hypervisible in public space.
A new photography exhibition at Bowdoin College Museum of Art, People Watching: Contemporary Photography since 1965, places the COVID-19 pandemic in the history of people watching and observes from a multiplicity of eyes how historical contexts have changed the implications of the activity over the past 60 years. The exhibition features more than 120 photos by almost 50 photographers from the last 60 years, including Irving Penn, Accra Shepp, Andy Warhol, and Ai Weiwei. Over 40 works featured in the exhibit have been acquired since 2020, including photographers such as Adou, Jules Allen, Larry Burrows, Chan Chao, Paul D’Amato, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Mikki Ferrill, Jona Frank, Katy Grannan, Graciela Iturbide, Rashid Johnson, Meryl McMaster, Daido Moriyama, Laurel Nakadate, and Farah Al Qasimi.
Andy Warhol, Pele, 1977, polaroid print. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. © 2023 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
In setting the COVID-19 pandemic within the history of “people looking,” the exhibit compares the perspectives with which artists and journalists look at their subjects. The above picture comes from Warhol’s Polaroid collection, which he started shooting in the early 1970s. It features individuals who passed through his Union Square studio, a subject quite different for the celebrity photographer. Although he had access to professional photography equipment, Warhol opted for an affordable, easily accessible Polaroid for this collection as “The Polaroid gets rid of everybody’s wrinkles, sort of simplifies the face… I try to make everyone look great.” This image, indicative of those in the collection, positions Warhol as an observer of and equal to his subjects. The camera is level to the individual’s face and captures a moment of acute personal expression of love for the individual’s hobby. Shot on a camera anyone could own, Warhol’s eye captures the everyday joy in ordinary life in an incredibly intimate way.
Mitch Epstein, Untitled (New York), 1998, chromogenic print. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. © Black River Productions, Ltd., Courtesy of Mitch Epstein / Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
Whereas Warhol sought to express the intimacy of the personal life in a public way, other artists like Mitch Epstein used ways of looking to obscure that distinction. The above image, shot in New York City, where the personal and the public have a curious and often unstable but unquestioned relationship with each other, features the exhaustion of a woman in the back of a car. Much is left unanswered in this picture, such as the cause of her fatigue, whether the car is a personal car or a taxi, and if the viewer is someone close to her or a dispassionate observer. What this image expresses, though, is the almost-universal experience of the quietude of her exhaustion, the feeling of the weight without verbal acknowledgment. The stillness in the photo, the composure of the woman’s body, and the lack of motion in the background signaling that the car is stopped bring a meditative attitude to an otherwise stressful moment in the subject’s life. In this way, the image makes an otherwise personal expression of a universally felt emotion the subject of public contemplation.
Chan Chao, Mya Khaing, May 1997, 1997, c-print. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine.
What People Watching does beautifully with the photographer’s eye is showing the progression of the personal to the public, where it becomes a universally recognizable feeling. Extracted from Chan Chao’s book Burma: Something Went Wrong (2000), which depicts portraits of young people’s public resistance to the oppressive government in Burma, the above image invokes a sense of solidarity between those in the struggle, despite the singular portrait. The subject’s look of simultaneous determination and despair signals participation in an arduous trial that may not end in victory for him. Coupled with the worn athletic clothes and sizeable red boxing gloves, the portrait implies that those fighting are fighting with any means they have. The fact that Chao participated in the struggle against oppression himself implicates him in this image even though he is not figured. In this way, People Watching suggests that forms of seeing can be invisible and visible through shared experience.
Alfredo Jaar, Angel, 2007, c-print on mounted Plexiglas, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine © 2023 Alfredo Jaar / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Other artists explore beyond what’s visible through slight alterations of the visual. The above image, Angel, by Alfredo Jaar, figures an unnamed boy reaching up to the sky with his hometown of Luanda, Angola, set in the backdrop, a city whose growing oil economy has reaped riches for oil and gas owners. At the same time, workers have yet to own the fruits of their labor. Jaar set the boy in the center of the image’s tripartite format, evoking the triptych format of Christian altarpieces. Each panel becomes less saturated from left to right, making the boy particularly outstanding and placing him in the timeline of the city's economic progression. By conjuring the spiritual from the physical, Jaar extends the practice of “people watching” from a purely physical exercise to an intangible, ethereal project.
People Watching is an attempt to understand how one can look at another; it examines where these patterns break and converge and, much like a people watcher, allows the viewer to create their own stories of what they see and don’t see. There are moments where the power dynamic between viewer and subject is leveled, others where the subject controls the view, and still others where the look itself is meant to disrupt the power imbalance between the personal and the political. For me, one common element among the differences in looking represented in the exhibition is the attempt by the artist to capture the interiority of everyday people to express what often goes unexpressed, what is taken for granted, or what cannot be adequately put into words. The exhibition seeks to voice latent convictions that the viewer unexpectedly discovers are universal experiences only after bearing witness to another’s look.
