Going for a swim at a public pool. Rinsing off in the shower before getting dressed in a locker room stall. And then realising you’re being watched. Worse yet, filmed without your knowledge. Told in the form of a personal investigation, ‘The Pool Voyeur’ explores the normalisation of voyeurism in public places, going beyond the simple account of a news story to examine a societal issue.
Last spring, Laurène Daycard, a journalist specialising in gender-based and sexual violence, was the victim of an act of voyeurism. She took the case to court and succeeded in having the perpetrator convicted. Following this incident, Laurène discovered the extent of voyeurism – a largely overlooked phenomenon – and turned the camera on herself to tackle the issue.
She sheds light on a hitherto invisible aspect of the spectrum of gender-based and sexual violence and offers food for thought on the culture of voyeurism in which we are now all immersed.
The culture of voyeurism and the male gaze flood the visual and cinematic works we admire and are now reflected in our use of social media and in the normalisation of footage from surveillance cameras.
The swimming pool, a utopia of free bodies, becomes – for the duration of a film – a mirror of a society where everything is watched, scrutinised, and filmed, and teaches us anew to look differently.