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The New Yorker

Mark McKnight and the Bodies that Modernist Photography Didn’t See

By Chris Wiley

June 15, 2020

To be a sexual voyeur is to teeter between empowerment and frustration. On the one hand, the voyeur establishes dominion over the scene on which he is peeping, like a sovereign watching a jester juggle for his delight. On the other hand, he is subjected to a kind of humiliating taunt, because the object of his desire remains stubbornly at arm’s length. It’s no wonder that voyeurism is so intimately wedded to photography in the popular imagination: we take pictures to create the illusion of possession (of an object, a person, a moment), but the things that pass in front of our cameras inevitably wriggle from our grasp. Read More