Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera - now at SFMOMA

We are a society that is more watched than ever before. Recent years have seen a massive increase in the use of CCTV, camera phones and satellite photography. The Internet has made distribution fantastically easy and with our enduring digital footprint the issue of privacy is a contentious concern.

Taking the notion of voyeurism and surveillance as its starting point, Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera, which has travelled from London's Tate Modern to San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) features over 250 works of photography and film dating from the late 19th century to the present.

The works originate from a variety of sources, from CCTV footage and photographs by amateurs, as well as paparazzi to works by professionals such as Dorothea Lange, Weegee and Walker Evans.

Most of the shots were snapped covertly or without the knowledge of those being photographed, often with the use of a small or easily concealed camera. While sometimes controversial, this spontaneity gives an intimacy and authenticity to the images that is difficult to re-create in a formal image.

Investigating the shifting boundaries between seeing and spying, the private act and the public image, our obsession with celebrity and our concerns with our own privacy, Exposed examines some of the camera's most unsettling uses, including pornography, surveillance, stalking celebrity, and witnessing violence and poses compelling and urgent questions about who is looking at whom, and why.