Dirty Windows
A look at photographer Merry Alpern’s most provocative work
No one has made an artistic career out of voyeurism quite like Merry Alpern. In the early 1990s, the photographer—after discovering that a friend’s apartment offered a view into the bathroom window of a New York City sex club—took a series of photos of the goings-on inside. Compiled into a book titled Dirty Windows, the series captures men and women in various states of undress, engaging in sex acts, doing drugs, with the window dividers providing the perfect framing as well as a titillating sense of peeping-tom remove. “These minidramas and their unvarying props—condoms, tattoos, silicone, crack—filled my head and I began to think about the windows all the time. They found their way into my dreams,” said Alpern of the series. In 1999, Alpern followed up her sex club stunt by turning her voyeuristic lens on the shopping experience, capturing women trying on clothes and undergarments in store dressing rooms.
