Yes, they’re watching you. Art Museum exhibit traces history of surveillance

At the center of a room at the Wichita Art Museum is a tablet locked to Google Earth.

The satellite images are projected onto a wall at the museum, and guests are encouraged to snoop.

There is admittedly a certain pleasure to zooming in on images of your home – or, most likely, others’ – and even seeing images of it from street level.

But it’s more than just an interactive part of this exhibition – it’s designed to make you think about how much you’re being watched.

It’s possible you may be being watched even at this very minute.

The Wichita Art Museum has opened an auspiciously timed photography exhibition: “Surveillance: Who Is Watching You? Photographs from The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.”

The exhibition, which first was mounted at the Nelson last year, chronicles the history of surveillance, from photographs dated 1864 to Google Street View images.

Some of the most interesting parts of the exhibition:

▪ See how the Dutch government went to great lengths to censor classified areas in one of Mishka Henner’s Dutch landscape photographs. Beside the censored Google Earth image is a series of well-composed Google Street View screenshots.

▪ A roughly 4-foot-tall photograph of a golden sky is interrupted by a tiny speck in the lower-right-hand corner: a drone. (Trevor Paglen’s “Reaper Drone”)

▪ World War II-era street photography taken in secret: either the photographer hid the camera inside his coat or used a strange sort of curved lens to trick people into thinking they weren’t in the frame. Think of it as the predecessor to modern-day surreptitious Snapchatting.

The issue of surveillance and privacy is a hot topic – even in Wichita, the news that police officers are using surveillance cameras to bust drivers for traffic infractions in Old Town has drawn strong reactions. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern hosted a similar surveillance and voyeurism exhibition a few years ago.

“Surveillance is nothing new – it’s been going on forever,” said Patricia McDonnell, director of the Wichita Art Museum. “It’s not a new phenomenon – just with increasing technology, we can do it ever so much more.”

The exhibition will be up at the Wichita Art Museum through March 4, 2018. For more information, visit www.wichitaartmuseum.org.

This story was originally published November 19, 2017 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Yes, they’re watching you. Art Museum exhibit traces history of surveillance."