Into the Public Eye
Sharing photographs is a part of everydaylife today. Whether searching for images on Google or Pintrest, our use of technology for sharing images is at an all time high with 350 million images being uploaded to Facebook each day. The first ever photography retrospective to be organised by the New York Public Library, Public Eye: 175 Years of Sharing Photography, aims to explore the various ways photography has been shared in the public domain. The works on display are from the NYPL photography collection and the success of the exhibition is largely due to making the photographs and ephemera from the archive seem contemporary, relatable and of significance.
Walking into the Gottesman Exhibition Hall in the NYPL the visitor is confronted with a familiar sight: a family are posed with a smartphone taking a ‘selfie’. A mirror is suspended at an angle over the exhibition entrance – one has the choice to move on into the exhibition, or to stop and take a photograph to be shared via a social network or in a personal collection. This initial encounter presents the theme of the exhibition without the use of a traditional wall text and adds to the audience participation in the exhibition. The viewer is compelled to acknowledge that photography is social and pervasive even in the gallery.
The works are ordered into three sections: Photo Sharing, Street View and Crowd Sourcing. Introductory wall panels are presented at either side of the section so the visitor has the choice of how to navigate the exhibition. The wall texts are well curated, moving from analysis of contemporary trends in photo sharing, and then relating these to historical patterns in photography. Some images, however, would have benefitted from a small blurb about the project the photographs derive from. The two photographs on show by August Sander did not have any explanation, yet his typology ‘Face of Our Time’ is a great example of sharing photographs in Weimar Germany in the 1920s and would have added to the visitor’s knowledge of the different forms of sharing photographs, particularly in European history.
Public Eye is set in a large square room, and rather than using dividing walls to spilt up the space and create more wall displays, the curator, Stephen Pinson, has strategically used vitrines to display works and move the audience away from trailing around the walls of the exhibition. Photo albums and negatives are presented alongside photographic prints that are laid out flat - echoing how they may look in a photographer’s dark room or how they may be passed around and shared in a group. This gives the audience another view of how photography is used and shared and what it looks like before it is mounted and framed and put on a wall – as many photographs never make it to this stage.
The photographs on display are not organised in chronological order and thus creates thought provoking juxtapositions such as two Martin Parr photographs from The Phonebook, 1992, displayed below two photographs by Valdir Cruz Group-body painting, 1997. Cruz shows the traditional wooden piercings and body painting of a remote tribe living on the Amazon whilst Parr compares two people in early 2000s dress speaking into a large mobile phone. The side by side viewing of the images brings the audience’s attention to the diversity of the photographs in the NYPL collection. These subtle comparisons weave throughout Public Eye and encourage the viewer to compare and contrast, something that is not always so easily read in exhibitions.
The major curation highlight of the exhibition was the wall of Farm Security Act (FSA) photographs in the back-centre of the room. The display is made up of photographs 7 along and 12 up and showed a selection of photographs that were produced for the government agency during the depression era in the U.S.A in the 1930s. They are presented unframed in a glass wall mount. This displays the range and number of photographs that were collected by the FSA. Below there is a vitrine with books produced by the photographers of the FSA such as Walker Evans and Dorethea Lange, highlighting to the viewer that the photographs were shared within the government in the form of geltin silver prints and with the public in books that were widely published and can still be viewed in libraries today.
Public Eye succeeds in showing the audience that sharing photographs is not a phenomena that rose out of 21st Century technology but rather that it has existed as a basic component to photography ever since its conception in the mid 19th Century and the 'sharing' has only changed in its form and style.

















