Computer Science Geek

Project 366 (2020) | 19 July

First, I just love this as a photograph. I love that it takes you three different places: the room you’re in, the street and sidewalk just outside, the shop across the street. I love the depth of this photo; I love how many levels are involved.

But I also love that it pulls me into my own past, to a time when I was a working private detective. I specialized in criminal defense work, but I also accepted civil cases that involved surveillance. Sometimes surveillance is about a person–where does that person go, who do they see, what do they do. Sometimes it’s about a place–who comes and goes, when do they arrive, how long do they stay, when do they leave, what do they bring with them, what do they leave behind.

Surveilling a place is a weird, weird thing. It requires you to pay close attention for long periods of time without getting distracted, even if nothing is happening. It’s an odd sort of meditative state. Time gets strange. You sporadically question your own sense of reality, wondering if maybe you’d missed something, wondering if you’d somehow hypnotized yourself and failed to see something important. You feel separate from the world but still connected to it. It’s like seeing a passenger jet flying overhead and wondering about the people inside, knowing they have lives totally divorced from and unrelated to your own, and somehow those lives matter simply because you happened to look up and see them.

Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work