Glenn Connelly / Photo Editor

Fine art photographer Wendy Richmond may have taken a video of you on her cell phone, and it may be playing right now at her new exhibit at the Museum of Photographic Arts, “Public Privacy: Wendy Richmond’s Surreptitious Cellphone.”

Well, you’re most likely not in any, but what if you were? How do we occupy public spaces in our daily life? That is what Richmond sets out to examine in her series of about 60 15-second cell phone videos taken covertly in various public settings. Think street photography – only sneakier.

Richmond’s sharp eye for composition is evident even in the small, grainy videos that she has arranged together in grids, so that two or more videos play in unison on one of the many small, elegant screens lining the walls of the exhibit. Each screen, neatly presented in a picture frame, plays a collection of one- to two-minute similarly themed videos; clips from workplaces, shops, subways and trains are a few examples of the roughly 12 total screens.

Richmond has a unique, minimalist point of view, and she presents each of her clips as a graceful portrait of daily life. By taking the time to carefully observe public spaces and capturing videos of regular, unsuspecting people living out their daily routines, she encourages us to think about the things we do in public – how and when we move or don’t move, speak or don’t speak. The exhibit shatters our perception of privacy, reminding us that in public, we must have no expectation of it at all.

Some of my favorite clips from the exhibit were of men washing windows as Richmond recorded them from the other side of the glass, as well as some haunting imagery of men working behind a blue tarp, casting their silhouetted, ghostly figures onto it. Also fascinating and sometimes humorous were the subtle ways people occupy a subway as they wait for their stop. Richmond takes these subtleties and calls attention to them, showing us this often-picturesque energy that usually goes unnoticed.

While watching multiple low-resolution cell phone video clips simultaneously takes some getting used to, the wonderful imagery captured is undeniable. Many of these small images would be stunning as enlarged photographs, but it is the surreptitious cell phone that makes the capturing of these transient moments possible – a larger camera would draw too much attention to itself.

This out-of-the-ordinary exhibit is the ultimate proof that your camera doesn’t matter. Richmond has an incredible eye for capturing the “decisive moment” when objects in the photographer’s frame are perfectly and artfully places; clearly the tool she uses doesn’t matter.