SOLD
Copyright ©
Merry Alpern
or applicable right holders.
Poster
Merry Alpern’s Dirty Windows series, shot over the winter of 1993–1994, is a seminal work of contemporary surveillance photography and urban anthropology. Positioned with a telephoto lens in a friend’s Wall Street loft, Alpern spent months documenting the illicit activities occurring inside the tiny bathroom window of an illegal, after-hours sex club across the air shaft. The resulting series captures a raw, subterranean economy of sex, drug use, and cash transactions playing out in the heart of New York’s financial district. For Alpern, the project was both a documentary endurance test and a complex projection of the "female gaze" onto the clandestine pantomimes of capitalism and desire, establishing her reputation for pushing the ethical and spatial boundaries of the photographic medium.
Merry Alpern’s Dirty Windows series, shot over the winter of 1993–1994, is a seminal work of contemporary surveillance photography and urban anthropology. Positioned with a telephoto lens in a friend’s Wall Street loft, Alpern spent months documenting the illicit activities occurring inside the tiny bathroom window of an illegal, after-hours sex club across the air shaft. The resulting series captures a raw, subterranean economy of sex, drug use, and cash transactions playing out in the heart of New York’s financial district. For Alpern, the project was both a documentary endurance test and a complex projection of the "female gaze" onto the clandestine pantomimes of capitalism and desire, establishing her reputation for pushing the ethical and spatial boundaries of the photographic medium.
