JULIEN BONET - CCTV

Technique: Promptography on Hahnemühle Fine Art paper
Size: 50 x 40 cm
Edition: 3 + 1 AP
Year: 2024-25

Signed, dated and edition numbered by the artist on a separate label.

CCTV

A figure stands motionless on the street, yet it is more absence than body. Its interior is a mirror of the city—high-rise buildings, streets, window facades. No face, no gaze. Only architecture. Here, the human being himself becomes the projection surface of an urban totality that simultaneously shapes and devours him.

CCTV is an image of the surveillance society, more subtle than any camera we see. It depicts not the act of observing, but the state of being observed: that silent knowledge that every action is being registered, every movement a record. The figure is anonymous yet completely transparent. Identity is no longer concealed, but dissolved – in the grid of the city, in the algorithm of security.

Julien Bonet's work questions not only control but also belonging: What does privacy mean when public space itself has become a lens? How does our behavior change when we move amidst constant visibility—between self-staging and self-censorship?

The cool precision of the depiction points to a deep ambivalence of our present: security and alienation, transparency and loss. CCTV tells of a society that protects itself by surveilling itself—and in doing so risks losing the people behind the facades.