Defending the Candid Gaze: Theory, the Archive, and Depolicing Street Photography
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Mountfort, Paul
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The Pennsylvania State University Press
Abstract
Since practically the dawn of photography, there have been concerns over street photography’s invasive and potentially exploitive nature, from late nineteenth-century tropes of pests and “sneaky characters” trailing women in public parks to more recent panics over “camera fiends” and even state security warnings of the need to be vigilant of photographers potentially casing infrastructure for terrorist attacks. This article argues, using potted history and critical theory, that such straw-man arguments distract from the real dangers that the policing and curtailment of public photography pose, characteristic, as they are, of authoritarian regimes where control over taking and circulating images is an integral part of oppressive state and corporate apparatuses. Street photography’s implicit role in the construction of an archive of aesthetic and documentary value can be understood as a type of resistance to such threatened microfascisms.
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Keywords
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4702 Cultural Studies, Street photography, candid, invasiveness, critical theory, archive, microfascisms, resistance
Source
Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, ISSN: 2380-7679 (Print); 2380-7687 (Online), The Pennsylvania State University Press, 9(1), 4-27. doi: 10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.9.1.0004
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This is the Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in the Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, © 2024 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved. The final, published version of the article is available at (see Publisher's version).