IF an image is seeing, then photography and voyeurism go hand-in-hand.

With the advent of photography and the capacity to mechanically reproduce images, we were confronted with the ability to see a multitude of life-like images from across the world. Other people’s lives. It was like looking into a mirror for the first time, but seeing other people in other situations. Similarity and difference, all at once.

The eyes became visual icons, full of power and meaning. The ability to see into the soul, the mind’s eye. This became a cornerstone for surrealism. In Louis Bunuel Un Chien Andalou, the main protagonist’s eye is cut open in sort of rite of liberation — freeing the unconscious, primal urges.

Since, countless filmmakers and photographers have explored the nature of voyeurism through varying degrees of realism.

Really, who gives a shit anymore about voyeurism?

Reality TV, webcams, helicopter news footage, surveillance cameras on rock t-shirts, Facebook, cellphone videos on YouTube. We are more than comfortable with looking at and being seen by others. I think there is even a profound sense of comfort that is associated with our most primal urges: feeding, fucking and fighting. We are fine with it on screens of all sizes. We have our new mirrors, reflecting ourselves, each other, and at lightning speeds. Instantaneous.

So when I see Gordon Magnin’s work, I can’t help but think that I am witnessing a new kindof voyeurism:

This aesthetic is interesting, though it has been around for a few years now. These images are increasingly flooding our visual landscape. They obviously have roots in collage; but they also pay their respects to our fascination with triangles, triples, trilogies…three’s: In a tenuous balance between three elements, there’s always an odd one out.

What is of interest to me in these images is the emotional ambiguity. What are these people feeling…? What’s their thought-process? Where are the eyes that see into the soul? The above pictures are dramatic, and are almost too literal as examples of what I am talking about. If you look at Niagara, by Alec Soth, the same logic applies. Here, Niagara Falls as a place of impermanence, of fleeting desires:

I do not want to imply that emotional ambiguity is what defines Niagara. Far from that.

Something needs to be said about work where the human subject’s emotionality is challenging, sometimes virtually inaccessible. Motives, primal urges are difficult to understand. This isn’t an issue of lacking ‘emotional intelligence’. It is about artistic work where basic humanness is locked up, hermetically sealed. I feel like these works create a space where the spectator is fundamentally alone with the film/photo; rare instances in our media lives where we tackle questions with no (or few) answers.

Last week, I saw Denis Coté’s new film Carcasses. Equal parts documentary and fiction, it is a film about a marginalized place: a junk-yard. While the synopsis would have you believe that the film is a portrait of Jean-Paul Colmor, the man who tends to the place, the character gets no preferential treatment over the car-parts that occupy the land. Coté (seemingly) takes great pleasure in restraint, maintaining a distance from his human subject and avoiding any clues into what motivates him. The film is almost like a stark reminder that we are absolutely alone in this world.

I see this new voyeurism as a reaction to a media landscape where everything exists in bite-sized formats. While it maybe true that our attention spans are becoming shorter, I always feel like throughout the hundreds (maybe thousands) of images that we see on a daily basis, we are rarely ever reminded that the world is a complex place. People are sometimes impenetrable, and full of contradictions and dead-ends.

The eyes cannot see past the surface of the image. This is an ironic force onto our traditional understanding of voyeurism.