Bedroom
Surveillance
Webcam
Automater
Pentax K50
Photoshop
InDesign
Automater
Pentax K50
Photoshop
InDesign
An exploration of personal spaces & surveillance
A curiosity about and a love for the way humans look has always drawn me to portraits and street photography. I want to know everything about everyone, but not as much as I want to daydream and fantasize about everyone: I don't want the curiosity to be satisfied. To me, people's bedrooms represent the peak of this fascination. Bedrooms are the most intimate of spaces, revealing snippets of who a person is, and who a person could be, even without, and often especially, without them present.
This era of my work is represented in a few different projects all with the theme, Bedroom Surveillance.
I continue to collect influences for this body of work. So far they include pictures of people's bedrooms on Tumblr, the song 'Bedroom Ceiling' by Sody, Laia Abril's Tediousphilia, Katie Grannan's portraits of people in their homes, Abelardo Morell's camera obscuras, and of course, JenniCam.
All of these pieces acknowledge the intimacy of the bedroom, which is sometimes sexual, but don't make the work about sex. Though naturally associated with it, the bedroom is much more than a sexual place and these projects explore interplay of the sexual with the other aspects and activities of a bedroom.
JenniCam was the first cam girl, but her stream was usually mundane and tedious; it was intimate but not pornographic. And when it was pornographic, it was just a natural moment in her life rather than something staged or tailored for consumption. Today, the term "cam girl" always carries a sexual connotation, and I wonder whether there could ever be another JenniCam, another cam girl who is not performing, who is just a girl in a room on camera. My third and most recent project, Cam Girl, explores just that — life in the bedroom being surveilled.
Even contemporary cam shows that are explicitly sexual have an interesting humdrum undercurrent. Tediousphilia documents the in-between times of 'webcam sex-performer couples' as they wait around for a paying customer. Despite the context, the scenes are boring, the performers weary. The presence in a bedroom, even the expectation of sex, does not seem to make the photos sexual or pornographic. Like JenniCam, the taboo of the bedroom is diffused by the monotony that we all know fills our own bedrooms but perhaps hope does less so in other people's.
Perhaps it is this tantalizing taboo that makes introducing a camera to the bedroom feel inherently sexual and devious, despite these projects attempting to prove otherwise. We are tickled by the idea because it feels slightly wrong, but also because we are voyeurs. The mere existence of JenniCam, Tediousphilia, and those aforementioned bedroom photos on Tumblr reveal this voyeurism we may be reluctant to admit. In peeking into other people's rooms we hope that we can see something we're not supposed to, a crack in the monotony. The bedroom is typically a private place which few are invited into and fewer are invited to truly explore. It is a place typically free of surveillance, a place we feel safe to express ourselves, protected by those '4 white walls who know more than our friends' (in the words of Sody.) The outside world is certainly not invited in, and at best can steal a glance through a window or imagine based on sounds drifting through walls.
My book, Inside, explores the apartment bedrooms of a group of early-twenty-somethings. As I photographed my friends' rooms and laid out the book, I tried to create tension between mystery and invasion of privacy, a line that is emphasized and ever-so-tantalizing in apartment buildings. How much do we know about our neighbors that we share walls, floors, and ceilings with? They may know our schedules, music taste, voices, sex lives, and domestic arrangement, but not what our home looks like, even if it has the exact same footprint as theirs. Our neighbors may be unconsciously surveilling us, learning about us, and us about them, while never being given the satisfaction of putting visuals to our sounds.
JenniCam operated for seven years and eight months, but the general public did not experience 'bedroom surveillance' until the pandemic. Privacy is a rapidly changing concept in the era of Big Tech, AI, and social media, yet the bedroom still feels truly private and personal. Lockdown meant many of us were taking Zoom calls from our rooms, showing these private spaces to a whole new audience: our coworkers, classmates, and teachers. Some hid their backgrounds while others, myself included, relished the ability to glimpse other people's spaces and let them see mine. Let them see my art! Let them see my unmade bed! This is me and it feels so wrong and so delicious that you get to perceive me as a regular human in a regular bedroom. However, work from home "oopsies" made some people feel too human, too exposed to their colleagues, whether it was a naked spouse walking through the room, a baby crying just off screen, or even just a towel draped over a closet door in the background.
Zoom let us be voyeurs and exhibitionists at the same time while confined to our rooms, in the same way closely arranged apartment buildings do with tungsten lit windows. But how can we reverse roles and be the voyeurs of the outside from the inside? Can we invite surveillance into the bedroom and then distort it?
My first attempt at this was through a camera obscura. Inspired by Abelardo Morell, I turned my bedroom into a giant camera which reflected the view out my window. I sealed off my windows with industrial trash bags and electrical tape; my large first floor windows cutting the outside off completely for the first time. A pin prick "lens" projected the view outside my window onto my walls. I watched people walk and bike by, saw cars coming and going, watched the trees blow in the wind, saw snow turn the grass from green to white. I could see the outside perfectly (though upside down) and they couldn't see me at all, would have no idea I could see them. I was surveilling the outside from inside my bedroom. Long exposures on my camera captured stills of the scene. I invited my girlfriend in the frame to push the tension between inside and outside even more.
Having surveilled the outside world and thoroughly messed up my Circadian rhythm with two separate camera obscuras, I was obsessed. However a move to NYC took away any interesting view that would translate to the camera. Instead, I was surrounded on two sides by buildings barely a stone's throw away whose staggered windows did little to block my view into strangers' apartments. I've realized this is a delightful quirk of densely packed cities and I've been known to exclaim in jealousy at other people's apartments with better, more interesting views into neighboring lives.
While I spend a fair amount of time hoping I'll see someone through their window, I rarely stop to think about people looking in mine. I change without thinking, invite people into bed without closing the curtains, and mainly, spend hours at my desk directly across from my biggest window. I have no concept of people surveilling me because I've never caught them in the act, just as they've never caught me, but what would they see if they did look? What do they see?
I decided to surveil myself, JenniCam style. Rather than streaming a continuous view of my room, I set up Automator on my old MacBook to take a webcam photo every ten minutes for a week, then looked back to see what had been caught. The knowledge of my laptop being there, even though I turned the display off, made me feel weird a lot of the time. I knew I was being watched. Sure, I didn't know exactly when a photo would be taken, but what if it caught me naked, or worse, doing something weird? Looking at the photos when I decided I'd had enough made me realize those fears were mostly unfounded. Like Tediousphilia, like JenniCam, the majority of the captured moments were very mundane. They were black screens as I slept, sometimes with my neighbor's lights streaming through the window, or me at my desk, or laying in bed. I already knew I did those things, but seeing myself do them was very uncanny.
Email me to purchase a hard copy of Cam Girl.
Cam Girl made me feel weird more than anything else. I decided I needed a break from my own bedroom and turned to other people's. I wasn't going to set up a webcam in my friend's rooms (unless...,) instead I wanted to see what a room can reveal about someone without them in it. Obviously, seeing other people's spaces is one of my favorite things. I love to see what they have chosen to decorate with, which pictures they've framed, and what stuffed animals they have on their bed. I always ask for a tour first thing when I go to someone's place for the first time. This curiosity led me to create Inside, a photo book of my friends' spaces. Like Cam Girl and Bedroom Camera Obscura, Inside is about more than just a room, it's about surveillance, privacy, and growing up. Read all about that project here.
This work continues as my curiosity will likely never be satisfied. Despite JenniCam's dissolution into obscurity, I feel like we are in a golden era of cam girls because of the popularity of OnlyFans. I am interested in exploring the rise of OnlyFans more and how it, like most things, can trace its roots back to just a girl in a room.