Oslo, Norway (1997-2000)

 

This project looks at CCTV surveillance of the public room in Oslo. The project is approved by the National Government (The Data Inspectorate), and the Oslo Police department. To do this project I had to be nationally security cleared. With this clearance I got access to the security rooms of different Government buildings, subways, shopping molls, banks, post offices and streets.

This series consists of 48 pictures which are selected from some thousand images I photographed in the different security rooms. By building a tent around a monitor in each room, I could surf between cameras in different places and photograph directly from the screen, as interesting images appeared (live).

My intentions were to create a general impression of a city fragmented in time, and investigate the boarders between the private and the public in relation to the Governments laws of CCTV surveillance. These pictures show ordinary people that could have been you or me. The project maps a new visual landscape that is rapidly developing, where the number of cameras constantly increases and the surveillance camera itself gets smaller and more and more invisible.

The project looks at the technology of CCTV and the expanding use of this at the end of the millennium. The powerful capacity of zoom and the high image quality shows how importunate the technology has become in our human private sphere.

 

40x50cm, C-print, Aluminium, Laminat