Richard Gordon is a "straight" photographer in a refined, difficult sense of the term. Sleuthful toward appearances, he is drawn to the collateral meanings of “things as they are,” in this case the almost-hidden ubiquity of visual surveillance within contemporary urban spaces. In American Surveillance: Someone to Watch Over Me, Gordon is locked in a game of wits with “the public” as it conceals within itself an infrastructure of solicitous and unsolicited private observation, what amounts to an omnipresent regime of legitimated social distrust. Like his subject, Gordon is full of dissimulations. His pictures stand for other pictures, indeed countless numbers of other pictures in streaming time, few of them as wanted as Gordon’s, and none as decidedly reticent.

Gordon’s formal rigor is in its own way both an act of confession and a goad. In most of his pictures, the surveillance camera dwells with crisp indifference in the scene, and (whether or not we spot it) the strangeness of the video-ossuary that American cities produce daily and hourly rises to recognition. As a self-styled “little guy” whose sprocket-turned witness can register but not quite put a finger in the glass eye all around us, Gordon courts our impotence in the age of “terror” and “security.” We’re left with the discomfiting suggestion that a citizen’s conscience, much like a photograph's acuity, is ultimately an alien aliveness within the impishly prying normality of surveillance in this America.