INFORMATION

“The man-made world is constructed through human interaction, even the streets and sidewalks. But we take it for granted. This work is about not taking it for granted.” – Lewis Stein, Mousse, 2017

Lewis Stein (b. 1945; d. 2022) was a conceptually oriented artist active across various mediums. After studying at MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, from 1968 Stein lived and worked in New York City. This exhibition focuses on one of Stein’s most significant bodies of work: a 1984-85 photographic series that takes surveillance cameras as their subject. This series was initially exhibited at Postmasters Gallery in New York in 1985.

Stein turned to photography starting in the late 1970s. He was interested in extending his investigation of systems of control by documenting elements of his surroundings with a balance of criticality and humor. An apogee of this exploration is his Surveillance series, five of which are on view here. For these works Stein used high speed film to photograph surveillance cameras around New York City, embracing the grainy effect generated by this process. This confrontation and interface between one mechanized lens and another captures the ominous ubiquity of constant surveillance which has only proliferated and become ever more insidious in the present moment. Yet in making these cameras the quirky subjects of large scale photographs, taken frontally, blown up and blurry, the cameras are defanged. With the distance of time they evoke eccentric robots.

The present exhibition provides a rare opportunity to assess the systems that quietly condition our daily lives from a prescient and still timely commentator.

Written by Alex Bacon