The difference between public and private is the difference between the scene and the obscene.
The obscene is an excessively close-up intimacy beyond the discriminating distance of theatrics or mirrors. The disgust stems from a breaking of moral limits, where the private is made known to the public beyond request, beyond intimacy, beyond imagining.
At this point, the obscene collapses the imaginary with too much reality. The scene is quaffed for the public, while the ob-scene moves into the private, and then through it.
An implication: The media’s functional role is to expose, to move beyond the public/scene into the private/obscene, which takes it beyond pornographic. The willingness to capture is not titillation but a function swollen by the technology: with a zoom lens and access, the imperative to forensically reveal is undeniable.