ic takes reproduced existence as it was and, by going into "real" situations, they were the ideal vehiele for the voyeur. The person who looked at the photographs could be sure that they were taken in a true "heated" situation, and know that the buttocks on paper were real buttocks. The sensation of "surprise," which is the work of a snoop and provoked in all photographic images, is intensified when the mechanical eye's victim tries, without success, to stop the take. The result is an ambiguous play of mirrors: the gesture of rejection is really an attempt to exorcise the anonymous voyeurs who are prefigured inside the lense. The prudish hand , he Id out to stop the take, does not repel the photographer as much as it repels us because, though we are absent , our presence is announced by the camera. Involuntary photography subjects do not confront an impertinent concreteness, but a universal scrutinizing. The eye of the camera is neither masculine nor feminine, neither accomplice nor enemy. It is a pure , impersonal look. The loo k of a look. It is the look of God . Perhaps it is because of this that there is nothing more shameful than the undesired intrusion of a camera into our intimate moments. 111. LOOK5 THAT KILL (ardent pupils) It is enough that another looks at me so that I will be what I amo The tendency to f1ee .. . I read it in that ambushing
look... that is pointed at me. What I understand is not that there is someone, but that I am vulnerable, and have a body capable of being hurt ... that I am defenseless, beca use I am being seen. Sartre Being and Nothingness
The sudden look of a peeper paralyzes you, takes you out of yourself, pins you like an insect is pinned by an entomologist; it eats your liberty and forces you to recognize yourself as the shitty object you have always been . By being surprised, you watched -you watched and surrendered. Beneath the empire of your eyes those women lurked in their snake-like bodies. However, when you are interrupted, your look staggers and loses its power. It has changed its point of view and now you are also an objectspectacle, and part of the scene that establishes the new voyeur. "What are you looking at?" Your impertinent answer is a challenge: to resist the look and to objectify that which objectifies. What should you do when something looks at you? How do you bend the impersonal eye and urgency of the camera? AII looks petrily. However , that perverse machine that looks petrifies even more. That subjective contraption interrupts your intimacy and forces you to acknowledge -there is no escape-- the existence 01 your lellow man who is your witness. The intrusive eye always galvanizes. However, when the ominous sphincter 01 the diaphragm accompanies the flash, you be-
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come like a rabbit caught in a light -the trophy 01 the dark room. If the eye of the fellow man robs you of your free will, the blind loo k and brilliance of the camera shoots you into time and its possibilities. Your destiny is an album of dissected souls where you will be , lorever, a "has-been." Don't get within gun shot. You do not want to be in everyone's eye lor all posterity, that hopeless person with a body shaming yOU. You do not want to appear in Luna Cómea. IV. 15 THE LOOK VERV NATURAL? (the phenomenology 01 the heebte-jeebies) Modesty and, in particular, the fear of being surprised in the nude, is nothing but a symbolic specification of original shame: the body symbolizes, in this case, our objectivity without defense. Sartre Being and Nothingness
As we flirt from the balcony we blush at our own nakedness, the defenselessness 01 being a body "outside" and in sight of a fellow man who forces us to recognize that we are what we are. Modesty is not the shame of being fat or thin , flaccid or emaciated, but being objects out in the open. That is the original shame. Taken naked by surprise gives us the heebie-jeebies because we are aware of our intimate fragility, because we understand that we are a body for another. Modesty -being univer-