5 voyeuristic photo stories that offer a peek into people’s private lives

There’s a problem with making a list of voyeuristic photographs: pretty much all photographs are voyeuristic to some degree. And don’t just take it from us. Throughout the history of the art form, many photographers have drawn parallels between taking someone’s picture and stealing a furtive glance at something private, something forbidden.

Diane Arbus: “I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do – that was one of my favourite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.”

Martin Parr: “I accept that all photography is voyeuristic and exploitative, and obviously, I live with my own guilt and conscience. It’s part of the test.”

But obviously, some photographers lean harder into the voyeuristic side of the medium than others. Peeping at the world through everything from glory holes to global surveillance technologies, these photographs don’t just use voyeurism as a method, but unpack the nature of voyeurism itself in front of the lens.

We’ve gathered some of the best examples below.

Jeff Mermelstein’s #nyc sees the city through a very specific lens, or rather an interface: the chat screens of its citizens’ smartphones. It practices a kind of voyeurism we can all relate to, peering over someone’s shoulder to see what they’re typing to friends, family, lovers or even enemies while riding on public transport. Over the course of several years, the photographer mined this for all it was worth, catching snippets of conversations about everything from roommate disagreements to the logistics of anal sex.

DANI LESSNAU, EXTIMITÉ

Pinhole cameras are, for obvious reasons, a voyeur’s dream, used by art photographers and international spies alike to capture the world from a hidden perspective. But Dani Lessnau took a very different approach for her photo series-slash-performance extimité, placing the pinhole camera into her vagina to capture her lovers.

The resulting images (which were all produced consensually) show moments of intimacy and personal exploration. “In relation to my individual lovers, some were awkward or shy initially, and some were less so,” she told Dazed in 2018. “As we engaged in the process, we opened ourselves to the experience of a freedom unique to each of us. The sense of freedom was arousing in and of itself.”

SOPHIE CALLE, THE HOTEL

In her photo series The Hotel, shot in the 80s and published as a standalone book in 2021, Sophie Calle’s voyeuristic gaze is not trained on people, but what they leave behind. In the opening of the book, the conceptual artist recalls being hired as a temporary chambermaid at a Venetian hotel in 1981. “I was assigned 12 bedrooms on the fourth floor,” she writes. “In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and observed, through details, lives which remained unknown to me.” The job only lasted three weeks, but that was long enough to create something profound from the contents of the prying eye.

JON RAFMAN, NINE EYES OF GOOGLE STREET VIEW

Rafman’s seminal internet art series centres around one of the 21st century’s premier voyeurs: Google. His ongoing photo series is produced by combing through Google Street View for unusual or uncanny images, from masked gunmen and burning cars, to seaside nudes, to lads in tracksuits throwing their middle fingers up at the camera. The series takes its name from the “nine-eyes” of Google Street View cars, which were rolled out to capture panoramic images of Earth for Google Maps in 2007.

“It represents a new type of surveillance very different from the totalitarian version depicted in books like 1984,” the artist told Dazed in 2013. “The technology of Google Street View is for the most part accepted by this society of spectacle; as with tools like Facebook or Twitter, people participate in the sharing of their private lives and find a great deal of meaning in it.” 13 years later, the line between subject and voyeur is blurrier than ever.

ANDY WARHOL, SELECTED FILMS