For decades the male portion of several American generations had concentrated its fantasies of erotic experience on thousands of images of 'the girl next door,' unself-consciously naked and ready to go, and now, it seemed - according to numerous sophisticated specialists in the art and science of capturing images - one voyeur had managed to repackage those fantasies as something real.
I had to meet the guy - which is what others tended to say when they wanted to see the tapes.
"I approached the voyeur through friends, and he told me that he believed himself to live on the cutting edge of 'one of the most scintillating and important things happening in the culture.' He said he believed everyone had watched at one time or another.
"'I'm just the best,' he said.
Eventually, he invited me to watch him watch."
In The Voyeur, Donald Katz pulls back the curtain to reveal the fascinating existence of the man known as the voyeur, or the viewer, as he occasionally refers to himself, who captures the lives of his neighbors on video to create movies about real life as it happens.
The Voyeur is one of the fascinating profiles featured in The King of the Ferret Leggers and Other True Stories by award-winning journalist Donald Katz, available in audio exclusively at audible.com. It was originally published in Esquire, October 1993.