The Encyclopedia of Kurt Caviezel

Kurt Caviezel's first monograph gathers screenshots taken over fifteen years of watching roughly 15,000 publicly accessible webcams around the world, sorted into a taxonomy of recurring human behavior.

Working from his studio, Caviezel captured whatever caught his eye across an archive that grew to more than three million images, then grouped the results by subject and gesture rather than by location: bathers, weddings, photographers at work, stolen kisses, and the reflexive poses people strike for a camera they know is there, the wave, the thumbs-up, the bike raised overhead. The book prints more than 2,000 of these images alongside a foreword by German artist Joachim Schmid, who argues that the sheer quantity is the point, that a single frame is banal but a sequence of kindred ones becomes evidence of pattern. The dust jacket lists all 15,000 web addresses Caviezel used to build the archive.

A selection from the project was shown in the 2016 exhibition Public, Private, Secret at the International Center for Photography in New York, part of a wider body of critical work on the ambient, consent-free photography produced by networked cameras.