Dirty Windows

Merry Alpern's Dirty Windows reduces surveillance photography to its rawest form: forty-some black-and-white frames shot through a bathroom window, aimed at a makeshift brothel used by Wall Street traders after hours.

In 1994, Alpern set up a medium-format camera in the bathroom window of a friend's apartment overlooking an air shaft off Wall Street. Over several months she photographed a room used for paid sex and drug use by financial-district men and the women they hired, working without her subjects' knowledge. The pictures are cropped tight and grainy, closer to surveillance footage than composed photography. Scalo published the sequence as a small monograph in 1995, its plain grid layout keeping the evidentiary tone of the source material intact.

Alpern had worked as a documentary photographer before turning her camera on that window, and she has said the project began as an exercise in looking rather than a statement about gender or class. Its covert method and its subject, sex for sale steps from the New York Stock Exchange, made Dirty Windows one of the most argued-over photobooks of the 1990s, still cited in debates over consent and the ethics of an unseen camera.