American Surveillance: Someone to Watch Over Me

American Surveillance: Someone to Watch Over Me collects Richard Gordon's photographs of surveillance cameras in American public places, with an introduction by Jason Francisco.

Gordon does not point out every camera, and the viewer cannot always tell what is a camera and what is not. Francisco calls his method straight photography and describes the pictures as exquisitely descriptive and slow to make. He reads them as a kind of counter-espionage carried out with a camera. They do not accuse, he writes, and they muse about Big Brother, treating a system that is vast in scope and hard to hold to account. Chimaera Press published the book in 2009.

Gordon (1945-2012) was born in Chicago and studied at the University of Chicago. He taught part time at City College of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies. Meta Photographs (1978) is a conceptual work on how society uses photography, and One More for the Road (1996) documents a friendship. He held a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1982, and his work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Library of Congress.