WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?

What Are You Looking At?

On an otherwise bare concrete wall beneath Marble Arch, Banksy stencilled the words WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT? directly within the field of vision of an existing CCTV camera. There are no figures, rats or elaborate imagery. The camera itself completes the composition.

This extreme economy is what makes the work so effective. The question appears to be addressed directly to the surveillance camera—and, by extension, to whoever might be watching behind it. At the same time, it addresses the passer-by looking at Banksy's intervention. Viewer and observer suddenly exchange positions: who exactly is watching whom?

Painting Under Surveillance

The work is securely dated to 2004. It appeared in the labyrinth of pedestrian subways beneath Marble Arch, close to the public toilets. It was reproduced in Banksy's own publications, including Cut It Out and later Wall and Piece, providing strong contemporary documentation for both its attribution and date.

The location was fundamental. Banksy did not paint an image of a surveillance camera; he appropriated a functioning element of the city and turned it into part of the artwork. More mischievously, the unauthorized intervention was apparently executed inside the camera's own surveillance zone. The technology supposedly designed to prevent such activity had failed to prevent the artwork commenting upon it.

Watching the Watchers

What Are You Looking At? belongs to an important strand of Banksy's work concerned with surveillance and the regulation of public space, culminating on a monumental scale in One Nation Under CCTV in 2008.

Yet the earlier work is arguably more intimate. Rather than making a broad political declaration, Banksy creates what resembles a private confrontation between graffiti and the apparatus intended to police it. A mundane security camera—normally so familiar that pedestrians cease to notice it—is suddenly made conspicuous. The stencil does not merely criticize surveillance; it makes us aware that surveillance is taking place.

The photograph you sent is particularly good because it preserves the spatial relationship on which the entire work depends. The empty concrete wall, the small lettering and the disproportionately prominent camera should remain visible. I would definitely use this wide view rather than cropping tightly around the text.

Disappearance

Remarkably, the work survived for more than five years. In 2008, while Westminster Council was considering the removal of One Nation Under CCTV, What Are You Looking At? remained in place as redevelopment of the Marble Arch subway complex approached. Subsequent documentation records the camera becoming damaged and the surrounding subway system being progressively altered.

By early 2010 the stencil had been painted or sandblasted away. Someone subsequently added another question beneath the broken camera: “Who Are You Looking At Now?” The anonymous response provided an unexpectedly appropriate epilogue to a work whose meaning had always depended upon a conversation between the wall and the camera.