AS these words are being written, it is raining with a customary dull, grey, heavy persistence. As these words are being read, no doubt the weather registers little difference. This is, after all, Ireland, where rain can be considered one of the few constants in an otherwise rapidly-changing landscape.
But now, imagine that you are living not in a permanently dank northern European country but in a warm southern American one instead. That your view is not of low dark skies but those filled with a flawless azure blue. And that the people you can see are not scurrying towards the nearest dry shelter but basking outdoors in delicious and seemingly endless sunshine.
Paris exhibition
An exhibition currently running in Paris conjures up the prospect of just such a scenario. Held at the Fondation Cartier on the Left Bank, the show offers a selection of photographs taken by Alair de Oliveira Gomes, a Brazilian professor of both philosophy and contemporary art who died in 1992.
The subject of the pictures is pretty much consistent - young men on the beach at Rio de Janeiro, sometimes taking exercise, sometimes speaking to their friends, often just looking at the "tall and tanned and young and lovely" girls of Ipanema. The pictures have been carefully arranged in groups and, rather in the manner of Whistler's paintings, are given musical titles such as Sonata. Viewing the work is an unalloyed delight until a thought strikes the observer - all these photographs were taken without the knowledge or consent of the subjects. Gomes, it turns out, owned an apartment overlooking the beach and trained his camera on men who remained entirely innocent of his activity. In other words, for all the artistry of the outcome, he was a voyeur. Now voyeurism tends to get a bad press for good reasons. It involves, after all, a basic infringement of someone's privacy without any awareness of this on the part of the person concerned. Perhaps that privacy is hardly private at all. With regard to Gomes, for example, the people he chose to photograph were in a public place. They were not being observed in their own homes or places of work; to a large extent, their behaviour was governed by an understanding that they were outdoors and in the company of many other Rio citizens. Nevertheless, his photographs are intrusive because the man who took them denied his subjects any say in what was happening. Three further thoughts occur as a result of looking at Gomes's work. The first is that, had he taken pictures of young women on the beach without their awareness or approval, it is extremely unlikely that the results would be on display in a gallery, certainly not one with the pedigree of the Fondation Cartier.
No criticism
The argument would almost certainly be advanced that photographs of this kind had objectified the women in question, turning them into passive beings for the gratification of the artist and other observers. But reading the reviews of Gomes's exhibition, no such criticism appears to have arisen. Since the pictures were of men, evidently, the subjects were considered well able to take care of themselves, even when they knew nothing of the photographer's covert activity. Possibly this approach to the matter is correct, but without gaining the views of the people involved it is impossible to know for sure. The next consideration is whether voyeurism is an exclusively male activity, just as voyeur is a masculine word - can there be such a person as a voyeuse? Traditionally, the unobserved observer is always a man and his behaviour is perceived as either vaguely or explicitly threatening to those being watched.
In painting, literature and the cinema, the voyeur or Peeping Tom tends to be male and the object of his attention is a young woman. The latter is portrayed as vulnerable, the former as unpleasantly, even dangerously, predatory. In a rash of recent films, for example, a teenage girl, after unwisely listening to several telephone calls from an unknown man who claims to have been spying on her for some time, will then spend approximately two hours running around a variety of locked buildings while screaming loudly before invariably coming to an unpleasantly messy end, usually in the company of several of her friends. Not for Irish climes
That this was not the fate of the people selected for commemoration by Gomes gives a certain harmless charm to his pictures and leads to a third thought, which is that such work would be almost impossible to produce in this country. Who, after all, is going to spend more than 20 years peering out of his window secretly taking photographs of the corner boys in some Irish provincial town? Do the beachfronts of Bray or Ballybunion hold the same delights as those of Rio de Janeiro?
And finally, as mentioned already, there is the inescapable business of our climate. An Irish Alair de Oliveira Gomes therefore seems an unlikely prospect and a selection of snaps taken by a voyeur along the rain-drenched coastlines of Ireland will probably never find its way onto the walls of the Fondation Cartier in Paris.