Surveillance — Lewis Stein

“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. The series was initially exhibited at Postmasters Gallery in New York in 1985.

Stein turned to photography starting in the late 1970s, extending his investigation of systems of control by documenting elements of his surroundings with a balance of criticality and humor. For the Surveillance works, five of which are on view here, Stein used high speed film to photograph surveillance cameras around New York City, embracing the grainy effect generated by this process. Taken frontally, blown up and blurry, the cameras are at once ominous and defanged — with the distance of time they evoke eccentric robots. The exhibition also includes a readymade sculpture from 1968: a billy club that hangs from a nail.

Text by Alex Bacon.