The world is watching!

Let us imagine a situation where you are walking down a busy street. How likely would a person stop you? Stare at you? Examine you? Follow you? ... Not likely, unless it was your unlucky day and a swamp of creepers happen to be next to you. But guess what? It is not as unlikely as you might think. Every hour of your life outside your own space, you are probably captured and recorded in one of the millions of surveillance cameras around the world. On top of that, your picture could as well be distributed over the internet and currently viewed by millions of people without your knowledge.

Elevator operator taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson

How is that possible you asked? Let us go back to Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom I have mentioned earlier in my post on Friday, October 1. He was one of the most well-known street photographer back in the late 50's. He traveled around the world taking pictures of people and displayed it at his museum. Without knowing, an elevator operator's picture was taken and viewed by millions of people before she was made aware of it. Back then, it was one person with one camera. Now, things are different. 

Samsung Seek cell phone

Majority of people carry at least one cell phone with them all the time. Since 97, cell phones started to have embedded camera in them. Now, it has become uncommon for a phone to not have one. These cameras used to be of bad quality, but now, may can take as equal quality picture as a point-and-shoot camera, if not better. Imagine 10% of those like to shoot pictures like Henri. Do you still think, your pictures has not already been circling around the internet?

Security camera at Lawrence university building

If you are still convinced, then the next time you walked down a busy street, take a look around you. From a bank to a convenient store, there are surveillance cameras everywhere. It is impossible to walk into a building without being recorded by one of the cameras. It is also impossible to know whether that footage of you is going to stay inside that building or has already been uploaded to the internet. We are constantly being watched, without even knowing it. Below is the footage captured by a surveillance camera at a convenient store, and it was uploaded on to Youtube.

So my project revolves around the idea of the world is watching. The project is divided into 3 sets. The first set contains 10 pictures of camera phones. The set shows different varieties of phones which varies in size and shape yet shared a common aspect, camera. The second set contains pictures of stationary surveillance cameras from wall-mount to webcam and laptop cameras. They shows different types of visible cameras around you. The third set was inspired by Henri and the combination of first two sets. They are pictures that could have been taken from any of the cameras in the first two sets. Below are some examples.