As a television show,Candid Camera enjoyed immense popularity with American viewers at mid-twentieth century even as it fundamentally changed the way in which Americans perceived behavior on the television screen and their own vulnerability to being observed. The catch phrase "candid camera" had been current in American English by the 1930s, thanks to the development of fine-grained, high-speed films which made spontaneous picture-taking of unselfconscious subjects a staple of news and backyard photographers alike, freeing them from the constraints of long exposures and conspicuously large apparatus. But it was Allen Funt's brash sequences of ordinary people caught unawares on film that made "candid camera" synonymous with uninhibited surveillance of our unguarded moments, whether for the amusement of the studio audience or the more sinister purposes of commercial and state-sponsored snooping.

Funt was a former research assistant at Cornell University. His prior broadcast experience included gag-writing...