Screens: voyeurism vs. exhibitionism

In recent architecture the balance between the apertures of the windows and the walls has shifted towards an almost total transparency. This creates a new ambivalent relation between the people behind and outside the windows. The once explicit boundary between public and private space that was the precondition for the conflict in Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) has been replaced by an interaction between voyeurism and exhibitionism that has not yet found its social rules.

From: Stefan Koppelkamm, »Screens«, in: Stefanie Diekmann, Winfried Gerling, Freeze Frames. Zum Verhältnis von Fotografie und Film, Bielefeld 2010, S. 99 ff.

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