Next month will see the opening of the Open Society Foundations’ twenty-second documentary-photography exhibition. This year’s show, “Watching You, Watching Me,” focusses on surveillance culture, and features more non-traditional work than in previous shows. “Surveillance is very much part of the public conversation these days,” Yukiko Yamagata, the associate director of the O.S.F.’s Documentary Photography Project, said. “And we wanted to explore what this topic looked like, from the satellite to the street.”
Hasan Elahi, who was mistakenly added to the terrorist watch list in 2002, has spent the past twelve years recording his every move and sharing the documentation with the F.B.I. For the exhibit, Elahi created a composite image of more than thirty thousand photographs that is reported to be twenty seven feet tall and fifteen feet wide. Simon Menner will show photographs that he found in the former East German Ministry for State Security archives; these include photos of Stasi agents being trained in hand signals and the art of disguise as well as Polaroids taken during searches of private homes. Julian Röder, a Berlin-based photographer, will show stylized photographs of the European Union’s border-surveillance systems.
The show opens on November 4th, at the Open Society office in New York. Artists include Mari Bastashevski, Edu Bayer, Josh Begley, Paolo Cirio, Hasan Elahi, Andrew Hammerand, Mishka Henner, Simon Menner, Julian Röder and Tomas van Houtryve.
