SECRETS AND LIES is a juried photographic exhibition that explores issues of anonymity, surveillance, and the illusion of privacy in a digitally inter-connected world.

Photographers are invited to submit photographs that address, respond, criticize, or challenge the new realities of this public/private interphase and everyday strategies in the face of the dangers and pitfalls it represents.

As Europe and America are engulfed in the greatest crisis of mutual trust since WWII, as a result of the recent inter-spying revelations, secrets and lies seem to be assuming an ever more crucial character in public life. The era of “CCTV in every corner” already seems like an age of lost innocence when we now habitually email and web search in the knowledge that we are being constantly spied upon. And yet, at the same time, ordinary citizens are becoming for the first time equipped with the tool of the spy trade themselves: iphones with imperceptible cameras penetrate every corner of social life, with every private moment potentially already being part of the public sphere.

In this world of vertical and horizontal, covert and yet overt mutual surveillance the question of ‘if the walls could talk’ assumes a new, perplexing dimension. For it is in this context of hyper-visibility that conspiracy theories seem to thrive the most, enjoying mass audiences as well as sophisticated apologists at the core of democracies fashioning themselves as immune to such irrationalities. Under their rubric, every revelation appears as a cover-up, and every disclosure as the disguised fostering of a secret.

Jury

Jon Levy – Founder & Publisher, Foto8.com

Dr. Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov – Lecturer Social Anthropology, Fellow Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge

Alexandria Niki – Co-Founder & Publisher, Resource Magazine

Dave Shelley – Co-Founder & Creative Producer, Photoville

Nayanika Mathur – Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Conspiracy and Democracy, CRASSH, University of Cambridge