Is it a case of genius or criminal behavior? Have a brilliant innkeeper and her husband, a retired wildlife photographer, relied on genius or hidden cameras to reveal the love lives of their guests? These questions stir the controversy at the center of The Ultimate Voyeur. The owners of a Southern inn renowned for hospitality, Catherine Morgan and her husband are uncanny in their way of breaching barriers that people hide behind. Each chapter of The Ultimate Voyeur explores the innkeepers personal story and includes an episode involving guests. One guest, a talented scriptwriter, learns about the several hundred files compiled by Catherine and turns them with the innkeepers help into a massively popular TV program airing once a week. The episodes unfold the hidden love lives of the guests, extending from ingenious bedroom farce (The Jinx in High Jinks) to passionate romance (The Ten-Million-Dollar Wedding Ring) to something sinister (Whodunit to the Famous Mystery Writer?). The portrayal of the mystery writer strikes too close to home. Infuriated at his loss of privacy and sure that hidden cameras are to blame, he finds ambiguous evidence at the inn and plots his vengeance. In his wild retaliation that transcends his cardboard characters, the separate realms of life and art explode on contact to reveal the innkeepers inmost secrets. At the climax, one is led to fundamental insights into secrets at the heart of everybody and the chaos or compassion that results from their disclosure.

Theatre as Voyeurism (re)defines voyeurism as an 'exchange' between performers and audience members, privileging pleasure (erotic and aesthetic) as a crucial factor in contemporary theatre. This intriguing group of essays focuses on artists such as Jan Fabre, Romeo Castellucci, Ann Liv Young, Olivier Dubois and Punchdrunk.

Chloroform, telegraphy, steamships and rifles were distinctly modern features of the Crimean War. Covered by a large corps of reporters, illustrators and cameramen, it also became the first media war in history. For the benefit of the ubiquitous artists and correspondents, both the domestic events were carefully staged, giving the Crimean War an aesthetically alluring, even spectacular character. With their exclusive focus on written sources, historians have consistently overlooked this visual dimension of the Crimean War. Photo-historian Ulrich Keller challenges the traditional literary bias by drawing on a wealth of pictorial materials from scientific diagrams to photographs, press illustration and academic painting. The result is a new and different historical account which emphasizes the careful aesthetic scripting of the war for popular mass consumption at home.

The controversial chronicle of a motel owner who secretly studied the sex lives of his guests by the renowned journalist and author of Thy Neighbor’s Wife. On January 7, 1980, in the run-up to the publication of his landmark bestseller Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Gay Talese received an anonymous letter from a man in Colorado. “Since learning of your long-awaited study of coast-to-coast sex in America,” the letter began, “I feel I have important information that I could contribute to its contents or to contents of a future book.” The man—Gerald Foos—hen divulged an astonishing secret: he had bought a motel outside Denver for the express purpose of satisfying his voyeuristic desires. Underneath its peaked roof, he had built an “observation platform” through which he could peer down on his unwitting guests. Over the years, Foos sent Talese hundreds of pages of notes on his guests, work that Foos believed made him a pioneering researcher into American society and sexuality. Through his Voyeur’s motel, he witnessed and recorded the harsh effects of the war in Vietnam, the upheaval in gender roles, the decline of segregation, and much more. In The Voyeur’s Motel. “the reader observes Talese observing Foos observing his guests.” An extraordinary work of narrative journalism, it is at once an examination of one unsettling man and a portrait of the secret life of the American heartland over the latter half of the twentieth century (Daily Mail, UK). “This is a weird book about weird people doing weird things, and I wouldn’t have put it down if the house were on fire.” —John Greenya, Washington Times

The Graffiti Genius is a bittersweet romantic tale of what inspires a person. It is also a mystery mingled with suspense. Its setting of abandoned warehouses is as much a part of the story as its three main characters: a young woman unaware of her power as a muse, a gifted, young, Hispanic artist who portrays her, and an art conservator more used to salvaging multi-million dollar masterpieces than graffiti in a setting filled with waist-high weeds, drug deals, and homicides. The youthful artist finds his inspiration in the shy but irresistible model, and the art conservator finds her inspiration in discovering their identity while she neglects her restoration of a masterpiece. The artist also wrestles bitterly with his fathers murder as an innocent victim in a South American drug war, his familys journey to America where they struggle to survive, and his desire to join his brother, who has stayed to fight against the drug lords in his native land. As for the art conservator, she finds her toughness tested by the artists lack of loyalty to his talent and the looming demolition of the warehouses that will pulverize his paintings. Desperation makes her more ingenious in her quest to spare his finest works. In such a deadly setting, though, her efforts turn into a race to save the muse, the artist, and his art from violent forces threatening to put an end to all of them.

From 24-hour-a-day "girl cam" sites on the World Wide Web to trash-talk television shows like "Jerry Springer" and reality television programs like "Cops," we've become a world of voyeurs. We like to watch others as their intimate moments, private facts, secrets, and dirty laundry are revealed. Voyeur Nation traces the evolution and forces driving what the author calls the 'voyeurism value.' Calvert argues that although spectatorship and sensationalism are far from new phenomena, today a confluence of factors-legal, social, political, and technological-pushes voyeurism to the forefront of our image-based world. The First Amendment increasingly is called on to safeguard our right, via new technologies and recording devices, to peer into the innermost details of others' lives without fear of legal repercussion. But Calvert argues that the voyeurism value contradicts the value of discourse in democracy and First Amendment theory, since voyeurism by its very nature involves merely watching without interacting or participating. It privileges watching and viewing media images over participating and interacting in democracy.

"One of the best things going in auto-bio inflected comics these days." -- Art Spiegelman, Maus