Michael Wolf’s voyeuristic photos

The Transparent City, photograph by Michael Wolf

German photographer Michael Wolf currently has a collection on exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. It’s called Transparent City. If you like voyeurism — and who doesn’t? — you’ll like this series of photos.

He was interested in the architecture of Chicago so he took lots of photos of buildings. That’s cool and all, but the project got really interesting when he started zooming in on the photos and realized he was able to see what people were doing in their apartments and offices. (That’s when he discovered he had inadvertently captured the image of this guy flicking him off, at right.)

All candid photography is a form of voyeurism, right? But this is different. You expect you might be in a random photo when you’re outside walking around, but you don’t expect it to happen when you’re walking around naked in your apartment or cuddling on your couch.

Voyeuristic photography seems like it would be titillating. But Michael Wolf says that the invasion of privacy was surprisingly boring. From his website:

“What I found, actually, is how boring everyday life is. When I thought about it, one of the fantasies that I had was that I would get up onto these rooftops every night—for four or five or six hours—and I would look into hundreds of windows, and I would see all these thrilling things going on. But, ultimately, all I saw was either people sitting and reading or people sitting in front of a computer. In the condominiums, it was people sitting in front of big flat-screen TVs eating dinner—and there were a lot of people alone….

[I]t was a little sad to see, night after night, in all these buildings, that it was really just single people between the ages of twenty-five and forty, tired after work, sitting on the sofa watching TV. I was a bit disillusioned. I thought it would be more exciting than that.”

Wolf captures something important here: What protects so many of us from having our privacy invaded is that, at the end of the day, we’re not really all that interesting.

For those not able to make it to Chicago, more photos can be found on the MoCP website, the Michael Wolf website, and at Faster Times. Or see Wolf discuss the photos here.