'Exposed' at the MoMA

The SF MoMA will continue Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera since 1870 through April 17, so there's still plenty of time to see it, but be prepared - it is shocking and perverse, though not unbeautiful. I didn't make a note of photographers' names, but there were many images I'll never forget. This iconic image of Thich Quang Duc protesting treatment of buddhist priests by South Vietnamese authorities in 1963 functioned as a kind of fulcrum, positioned as it was in a glass case in the center of the room, but the images fanned out around it were just as extreme. A spinal column sticking out of a truncated torso in a pair of shorts. A would-be suicide on high scaffolds. The blackened but otherwise perfect face of a man burned by Nazis before he could squeeze out from under floorboards into open air. A police dog lunging like a bullet at a black man in the South. A lynching. An armored British Army hut like some space pod bristling with black spears on a little street in County Armagh. Surveillance shots of British suffragettes. Disintegrated remains in Rwanda. Burning oil fields in Iraq - 'the mother of all battles'. The whole thing was stunning, awful. I thought somebody should be filming us. The voyeur motif so clearly implied us, the consumers of art and images flocking like bats to open wounds. We pooled up around particularly shocking images in corners, we bumped into one another, looked at one another uneasily, tried to communicate our dismay and hide our fascination. Not so surprising, I suppose. But there was awe and reverence in the room as well.