Alain Declercq's Hidden Camera Obscura series consists of photographs taken in New York City in 2008, at locations where photography was explicitly forbidden due to heightened security measures in the wake of 9/11. In this sense, the series offers itself as a deliberate act of disobedience in the face of the politics of fear and often paranoid security strategies.

Alain Declercq's Hidden Camera Obscura series consists of photographs taken in New York City in 2008. Crisscrossing Manhattan, Declercq took photographs of locations where photography was explicitly forbidden due to heightened security measures in the wake of 9/11, including police stations, tunnels, bridges and prisons.

The forbidden photographs were taken using a home-made pinhole camera, resulting in dim, under-exposed or poorly framed images, emphasising the crudeness of a technique which draws its origin from photography's prehistory. With this fundamentally simple tool, a plastic box innocent of any hint of the photographic act, Declercq attempted a breach of the law, methodically recording what should supposedly be hidden from public view, despite existing in the heart of public space.

The work in this series is undoubtedly situated on the cutting edge of a constantly expanding border which divides public space into that which may be photographed and that which may not, a border enforced by authority whose reach and extent are arbitrary. In this sense, Hidden Camera Obscura offers itself as a deliberate act of disobedience in the face of the politics of fear and often paranoid security strategies which encourage mass hysteria, shaping reality and its perception through the mechanisms of control, oppression and misinformation. His low resolution photographs validate the intention of transcending this often meaningless imposition, underlining the fact that the depictions of the sites in question reveal no significant information.

Avoiding direct denunciation, Declercq's essential, consistent aim seems to be to analyse these political mechanisms and reveal their ideological tools, thereby assisting viewers to see beyond appearances.

(Based on the text by Marie Cozette for Alain Declercq's recent show)

Alain Declercq was born in 1969 in Moulins, France and is currently living between Paris and New York City. His work often constitutes an act of transcendence of social and political barriers, hoping to demonstrate that they are artificial and constructed. In his series Welcome Home Boss (2001), for example, he trained powerful spotlights on the mansions of Montreal's ruling elite at night, photographing the surprise of their unsuspecting owners. Despite the fact that Declercq sometimes mixes reality and fiction, his breaking of barriers is not always without consequences; his docudrama Mike (2005), in which he impersonated a character following a secret agent, provoked a search of his flat and interrogation by the anti-terrorist service. Despite the provocative nature of some of his work, be it photography, video, installation or an interview, Declercq seems to emerge more as an invisible "anti-hero" than an agitator or a charismatic activist.