Exposed

I visited this exhibition this week at the Tate Modern.

It's an exhibition about voyeurism - right up my street or so I thought.

Of course, my friend and I were attracted by the element of sleaze. But it's interesting how sleazey sleaze can get.

It was extremely clever in that you came out feeling just ever so slightly dirty. What we both thought might have been erotic, was far from it. Spying on people leaves a slightly unpleasant taste in the mouth, and seeing photos taken by people spying on other people can actually be said to be even worse.

There were elements that made me smile - a "paparazzi" shot of the artist Edgar Degas coming out of a French lavatory was one. But then we moved onto photographers such as Tazio Secciaroli and Marcello Geppetti who were famed for the relentless pursuit of film stars and celebrities...and the real downside of voyeurism began to reveal itself.

And then we have voyeurism and desire. For anyone used to elaborately staged porn films and airbrushed pictures this was a real shock. Watching couples humping with dirty washing in the background is not particularly erotic, partly because the munitae of daily life just reminds you that these are real people, not models.

When desire stops, death and violence begin. We saw pictures of a lynching, of a crowd gathering after a man dies in the street, and, most disturbingly for me, Lee Miler's photograph of the corpse of the beautiful daughter of the Burgermaster of Leipzig, who had just committed suicide at the end of WW2.

Of course, the flipside to voyeurism is exhibitionism, and there's plenty of that in Kohei Yoshiyuki's series of photos "The Park" where voyeurs stalk and even touch couples making out. To photograph them, the photographer too had to become one of the voyeurs.

I have only ever had one personal experience of exhibitionism. It was a long time ago, when I was about twenty. I was on holiday in Corfu with my first husband, then merely a boy-friend, and we'd hired out a motorbike for the day. Giddy with the freedom of being able to wear nothing but shorts, t-shirts, flipflops and no helmets, we speeded around the island for hours until we sped off the road and very narrowly missed a very gruesome death.

We limped back to our campsite, motorbike left in a ditch somewhere, hit our tent and had sex in the middle of the afternoon as if it was both our very first and the very last time. I'm not sure at what point I became aware that we had drawn a crowd, but I do remember knowing that they were there and suddenly everything became magnified. My moans became louder, our love-making more frenzied, and this continued until we eventually gave them a show that drew applause.

As soon as it was over, however, embarrassment set it, for me at least. The ex, nonchalant as usual, went out foraging for food, embracing the attention as he went. I, meanwhile, hid in my sleeping bag determined to wait until the crowd had dispersed to venture out. That was until I realised that I had left a quarter of a watermelon in the corner of our tent and the whole tent, sleeping bags included, was over-run with eager armies of both black and red ants. I crawled out of there as fast as I could manage, to a round of applause that I can still cringe about today.

Thanks goodness no one took any pictures.