Foucault’s idea of the relationship between visibility and power is summed up most starkly when he wrote “Visibility is a trap.”
Foucault’s observation can link back to Fox Talbot’s wife describing his cameras as ‘mouse traps’ and intuits the way many people feel the power imbalance in the presence of a photographer and how the photograph can diminish them.
This exhibition housed inside a building that once functioned as a panopticon does not limit it’s scope to an examination of institutional power but also takes on more subtle interplays between visibility and control such as might exist in a look between two people.
