I was teaching in Budapest in the icky tween years of the web, before 2.0, when it was mostly seen as an incredibly powerful new masturbation aid. 

I remember leaving class one evening with several of my students, and as we descended into the underground I watched a young man on the up escalator slip a sleek (for back in the day), expensive-looking video camera under the skirt of the young women ahead of him and switch on the bright lamp, illuminating her undercarriage. 

Ah, the wonders of technology. 

It was the bravado of switching on the lamp that impressed me most, as I recall.  I imagined she must have felt the heat from it on her thighs, but the woman remained seemingly oblivious.  I'm sure her panties are still floating out there in the deepest reaches of cyberspace somewhere.

I was so flabbergasted by the scene that I was speechless for a moment.  I literally could not believe my eyes.  By the time I recovered they had reached the top of the escalator and gone their separate ways.  I turned to my pupils, and still struggling for words, managed to stammer: "Did— did you see that?"

"See what?" they blinked and smiled.   

I remember thinking, 

    (a) I've got to get me one of those newfangled cameras, and

    (b) It's such a shame more men don't wear skirts.  At least in public. 

But what I saw that day was nothing compared to what was to come over the course of the next decade:  a veritable peoples revolution in covert digital photography.  Most of it was aimed up women's skirts, granted, but men's locker rooms and showers were a favorite setting, too. 


It was overwhelmingly the male gaze that the new technology served, and no male fantasy was left unexposed (although some, taken without the flash, were sadly underexposed) — from secret stalkers to the seemingly universal male fantasy of exposing our own epic manhood to an adoring audience of millions, no stones, so to speak, were left unturned. Considering the first camera phone came along just 8 years ago, and the first iphone arrived in '07 (and Guys With iphones [NSFW] didn't debut until late last year), we've come a long way, baby.

But who knew things would get so kinky that so-called ninja photographers would have to start photographing ordinary people fully clothed during their morning commute to get labeled "edgy."

Strange days, indeed.

There are loads of fascinating implications to iphoneography, privacy issues not least among them.  These cut both ways.  camphones have warded off would-be subway gropers and led to their arrest.  They've captured images of police abuse, too, that have brought wrongful arrests to light.  On the other hand, they've popped up at parties where people were acting stupid or engaging in unlawful behavior, which in the case of Michael Phelps, led to public embarrassment, professional sanction, and considerable private damages.  And watch out if you ever go to Wal-Mart dressed like this.

There is no question clandestine photography is instantly compelling, but is it art?  To rise to the level of art it needs two things: technical refinement and fearlessness when it comes to discourse on its implications. 

My friend Dejan Djordjevic's photography exhibition, "Subway Series," which opened last weekend at the Accidental Gallery in Fort Point (or FoPo, as the in-crowd calls it) has the one in spades, but not quite the other. 

Don't get me wrong.  The exhibition does not disappoint.  There is an impressive talent-in-the-raw at work here.  There are some amusing and arresting images that are all the more impressive for having been taken undercover and on the fly...

...but the narrative goes in and out of focus.   For me what may have tied the pictures together into a more cohesive exhibition is the element of ninja in them.  The seeing but not being seen.  In other words: the element of voyeurism.

It's not that the photos are exploitative, though they're skewed toward the quirky and topical.  They don't leer so much as cast an imperturbable gaze.  There is nothing the least bit lurid here (in fact the utter absence of any beefcake whatsoever in the whole series reminds me why quitting the T was so easy for me).  Some photos in the series have a slight air of menace about them, as if the subjects sense they are being stalked, but they fall far short of predatory. 

In private conversations, Dejan has expressed surprise — given the benign nature of the photographs — that some people have reacted as if he had violated his subjects' privacy.  He's even had a few threatening messages from anonymous stalkers himself.  But then turn-about's fair play, right? 

He's responded to the charge responsibly, by consulting a lawyer who has assured him that — as many of us are well aware — there is "no expectation of privacy" in public places like the T.  But there is — no denying it — a silent good-faith agreement among fellow commuters to respect each other's space. If there were not, trust me, it would be anarchy in the underground.  To argue that the gaze does not violate that good-faith agreement would be utterly disingenuous — you would not stare at another commuter, at least not in Boston.  OK, so why not take a picture?  It lasts longer, right?  That's what they say.

I would never question Dejan's good intentions, and a few of his portraits here are absolutely exquisite, but the show would actually have benefited from at least a cursory acknowledgment of the obvious element of voyeurism.  We can't help but contemplate the technical skill in light of the self-imposed strictures of the project, but we are then discouraged from musing on the psychological implications of them.  Which is a shame, because everything about the project is topical.  These are all (with the exception of off-topic pics of subway structures, thrown in to lend context, maybe) surreptitious iphone snaps originally posted to Dejan's facebook page.  A facebook friend with a gallery connection thought the project had the makings of a show, and the rest is history. 

When I first saw his "Subway Series" on facebook, I coudn't help but picture the photographer pretending to be innocently minding his own business — pretending to text or like he was test-driving that sick new sudoku app — all the time framing his shots and snapping pictures of his unsuspecting fellow commuters.  Trying not to get caught.  The danger of getting caught seemed like a major part — only just beneath the surface of each shot — of what animates this series, and possibly the photographer, too.  It has real implications for how we view these pictures.

And Dejan did take some heat on facebook for the nature of the project.  I always thought he should own up to the creepier implications of the shots that actually give them a dark appeal, but he's consistently shied away from the personal implications of what is, frankly and unequivocally, voyeurism.  His subjects may be clothed, but in notes on the show he hints at their nakedness and vulnerability.

On a very basic level it is the interplay between the photographer and his subjects that these pictures, like all pictures, are about — whether the subjects are aware of that interplay or not.  And if they are not, our attention is thrown all the more back on the photographer.  But Dejan's brief "about" statement on the Subway Series website, pointedly avoids the issue:

What began as an effort to kill time on the commute to work, armed only with an iPhone and Facebook account, the photographs quickly evolved into an artistic expression of juxtapositions focusing on the commuters on the Boston T. The photos, all taken with an iPhone, capture the real faces of the city. From the homeless to the high-powered, each photo illustrates an edgy look at T passengers from every walk of life. The terrible beauty is derived from the fact that the subjects, not knowing they are being documented, illuminate aspects of the human condition we walk past every day without seeing. 

Even the statement, written in the passive voice, contains not a single explicit mention of an "I" (or an "eye").  There is a grand social narrative here — rich and poor, black and white, "artistic expression", "juxtapositions", "terrible beauty", ahem — that oddly sidesteps the compelling intimacy of the images.  (And I have a beef with the presumption that the truths revealed, however beautifully, in the photos, go unseen or unnoticed by the rest of us — but I'll leave that for another screed.) 

The reluctance to own up to the skewed power dynamic implicit in covert photography could be seen as a moral blind-spot that undermines the grand narrative the show is shooting for. 

This dissociative attitude may be generational.  In a recent issue of Photo-Eye, Richard Gordon describes what he calls "one of the most distressing aspects of much contemporary 'art' photography": 

Pick up a book at random by too many younger photographers... and a pattern of style and (dis) engagement emerges. Contemporary art and high-end editorial photographic portraiture displays a bland, robotic affect of the subject(s) and the appearance of the most minimal emotional exchange between photographer and sitter. It is too early to say whether this affectless stare is — as one hopes — a momentary art tick, or if it is a reflection and proper description of the culture now. Regardless of the collaboration between subject and photographer prior to the click of the shutter, it is in that decision of when to click that the game is made.

The iphoneographer may be invisible to his subjects, but he is always present, though outside the frame, once he posts his pics.