A Genealogy of “Peep Media” and the Gaze

The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum is delighted to hold its TOP Collection series of exhibitions introducing the museum’s collection. This event in that series focuses on our collection’s rich body of works and reference materials on the history of imaging and photography. It introduces the devices that made peeping possible, the images produced with them, and the great variety of styles that artists, their imaginations expanded by the act of peeping, created.

The camera was invented as a device for photographing still and moving images; cameras can thus be called peep media. The camera obscura, ancestor of the camera as we know it, is an utterly dark box (or room) with a pinhole in one of its walls, to cast an image of the outside scene on the opposite wall. Later, the pinhole was replaced by a lens, and the box became more compact, reaching a size that made it portable. Another visual device with a structure that reversed the camera obscura was used for viewing pictures through a lens: the peep box or peepshow. Many formats for peepshows were devised, and they became a popular form of entertainment.

Variations on peep media include optical devices such as the microscope and telescope, equipment such as the stereoscope for three-dimensional viewing of pictures, and the Kinetoscope and other equipment for creating motion pictures. The invention and widespread adoption of these devices supported the birth of new pictures, images never seen before, and gave rise to countless styles.

Peep media have formed not just the media environment around us today but also the formal conditions for photography and video imaging. With this exhibition, we explore the genealogy of peep media and the gaze, as it is carried on today.

Chapter
–The Delights of Peeping
–The Eye That Observes
–Seeing in Three Dimensions
–Motion Pictures
–Beyond Peep Media and the Gaze

Artists
William Benjamin Carpenter, Laure Albin-Guillot, Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey, Harold Eugene Edgerton, Narahara Ikko, Onodera Yuki, Idemitsu Mako, and Ito Ryusuke

Organisers
Curated by Endo Miyuki (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum) 
Organized by Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum operated by Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture

More details here. 

Press inquiries
press-info [​at​] topmuseum.jp