Cheryl Sourkes
Cheryl Sourkes
Cheryl Sourkes’s exhibition “Public Camera,” organized by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography and presented at the National Gallery of Canada, consists of excerpts from several of her recent projects dealing with the global proliferation of webcams. This work has largely been discussed in relation to issues like surveillance and authority, the blurring of boundaries between public and private space, voyeurism and exhibitionism. While the exhibition statement notes that Sourkes’s project is connected to a “larger history of image making,” this is an aspect of her work that hasn’t often been elaborated upon.
In fact, it is striking to observe the degree to which her work suggests parallels between the relatively recent explosion of webcam sites and the history of photography, which saw its own period of rapid expansion. Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, an early writer on photography, observed in 1857 that “The world was believed to have grown sober and matterof- fact, but the light of photography has revealed an unsuspected source of enthusiasm.” Sourkes’s work allows us to reflect upon the enthusiasm for visual revelation that has resulted in a webcam world in which, recalling the 19th century’s obsession with seeing the world photographed, nothing seems too trivial or personal to be posted on the Web. At the same time, we are drawn into her highly aestheticized treatment of the instrumental images produced by webcams, a strategy reminiscent of the Pictorialist photographers’ use of painterly techniques to differentiate their art from the ubiquitous document.
Moreover, through her image choices Sourkes suggests continuity between early photography’s inhabitation of the pre-existing genres and compositional methods of painting and webcam imagery’s reliance on the traditions of lens-based media such as photography and film. It is in her larger works, especially, that Sourkes is able to bring to our attention the conventions of picture-making that webcammers employ.
One of the most striking parallels with 19th-century photography that Sourkes highlights is the use of webcams for the production of amateur porn and banal exhibitionism, which reiterates one of the first and most pervasive uses of the photographic medium. Wickedly funny and rather poignant is the segment of the 13-part work Private Life that presents a lone man’s struggle to keep his flagging penis erect during his webcam performance. The installation of works with more overt sexual content in a discrete area within the exhibition space provides a prudish echo of 19thcentury attitudes towards sexual imagery and serves as final proof that the meaning of technology lies in its uses and our responses to them.
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