That impulsive duck-face kissy photo you took of yourself and your friend at the Apple store to test out the new iPad's camera may be destined for an art gallery wall. That is if you happened to snap it at any of the Apple stores visited by Irby Pace.
"On a daily basis people are leaving their portraits behind on iPhones, iPads and iPods," says Pace who in late 2010 retrieved over 1,000 images from Apple products in stores across Texas and New York City. "Customers disregard discretion and abandon these photographs."
Pace, who is coming to the end of his photo MFA at the University of North Texas in Denton, began lifting the images by e-mailing and texting them to himself from Apple stores. "Later, I discovered a device to directly download massive groups of images straight to my own iPad," he says. From the huge cache of images, he has edited down a series of portraits and enlarged them for gallery exhibition. The project is titled Unintended Consequences.
Last year a similar art project by Kyle McDonald called People Staring At Computers used software that McDonald installed on Apple store computers to detect faces and capture an image every minute. Over 1,000 captures were automatically uploaded to McDonald's computer and then posted to a (now shuttered) Tumblr account.
But where McDonald's stunt garnered him a home visit from the FBI and got his laptop and flash drives confiscated, the only question hanging over Pace seems to be whether the images he extracted are the legal property of Apple. Pace said Apple store staff were not particularly vigilant: "None of them seemed interested at all in what I was doing. One employee in New York questioned what I was doing but I told him that I was merely comparing the products."
The distinction between these two projects is provocative. Aside from the fact McDonald installed "spyware" on property he didn't own, he also implicated members of the public without their stated permission. Without his subjects choosing to click the shutter, McDonald's People Staring At Computers was ethically dubious; a great stunt but truly a violation of privacy.
Pace argues that the people in his reclaimed images "represent themselves however they chose, and without scrutiny." His is a project less about the images and more about what it means to redistribute them. To reuse the anonymous portraits is hardly seditious but no doubt Unintended Consequences will make some people uncomfortable.
"Unintended Consequences explores changes in behavior for those people who have not considered how these images may be used," says Pace.
Pace feels justified in his actions and believes he broke no ethical rule. "The people [in the images] consciously left the images behind for anyone to see, or to take."
Inasmuch that Pace's "subjects" posed and captured the image themselves, the individuals in Unintended Consequences could be said to be willing participants. In the majority of cases, it seems they snapped their portrait in a performative manner and Pace has created an exhibition of them.
The project gives these abandoned images more prominence than they probably deserve, but there is wit and illusion to Unintended Consequences too. Just because these people go up on a gallery wall doesn't make them significant in any way; Pace plays with the aggrandizing that can often go along with white cube galleries.
It's a clever project, but what might Pace's subjects think?
"It would be interesting to know what their reaction would be to see themselves in a gallery and represented this way," says Pace.
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Unintended Consequences (Feb 5th–10th) will be on show at the Cora Stafford Gallery, 1120 W. Oak St, Denton, TX 76201. The reception is on Thursday, February 9th, between 5-7 pm.
Photos courtesy of Irby Pace.
