Playing with (In)visibility: Surveillance as Narrative Construction

Liverpool, United Kingdom, 2004. A woman is sitting outside a café writing in a notebook. She is white and dark-haired. Age: approximately 25-35. Dressed in a red rain jacket, she glows like a traffic light. Stop, she seems to say. Look at me. Stay long enough, and you will catch her glancing up at a nearby CCTV camera. I know you are there. 

In an exhibition at Tate Liverpool in 2004, these recordings appeared on large screens in a darkened “control room”. Encouraged to sit on a leather office chair, the viewer takes the position of camera operator. Before them is Jill Magid’s Evidence Locker, an art project exploring the limitations of urban surveillance technology in Liverpool’s city centre. Liverpool is home to the most extensive Citywatch surveillance system in the United Kingdom (Magid). Over a period of thirty-one days, Magid called the police to film her in certain locations and then obtained the CCTV footage by sending a series of Subject Access Request Forms to the police. The forms were written in the style of love letters, which Magid compiled into a diary titled One Cycle of Memory in the City of L-. 

CCTV stands for Closed-Circuit Television, a term which outlines the totalising aspirations of the surveillant gaze to produce a coherent image of urban criminality. Yet CCTV is not, in fact, a closed system; instead, the camera depends upon a fragmentary logic that requires an existing narrative to be made legible. Upon viewing Evidence Locker, it is not clear whether any crime has been committed. Deprived of knowledge, the viewer is encouraged to seek out evidence of criminality to identify a deviant archetype. This character is one adopted and performed by Magid, parodying the stereotype that the surveillance gaze has come to expect. 

The luminescent glow of grainy CCTV footage recalls an aesthetic reproduced across news bulletins, crime dramas, and—for a contemporary audience—social media. When faced with this visual schema, the viewer’s suspicions are raised. Evidence Locker invites its audience to grab the CCTV footage and turn it over, ransacking the image until it reveals to us a truth we have already come to anticipate. The chase is on—until finally, the woman in red climbs onto the back of a motorbike and slips away, vanishing into the dark, beyond the camera’s gaze. Magid is only toying with us: there is no crime, only the suspicious gaze of the camera, and now us. Guilty. 

In the act of constructing evidence, Magid highlights the dual involvement of audience and camera in the creation of a story; that is, a story of urban crime which is already written before any criminal act takes place. Indeed, CCTV systems always originate from a prospective dimension, anticipating the occurrence of a future crime and retrospectively providing evidence of it. In this way, the camera functions similarly to a police detective in a traditional crime drama. The pursuit of truth mimics the fragmentary logic of the CCTV gaze, which brings together a surveillant assemblage under the guise of a singular perspective. In refusing to reveal her crime, Magid draws attention to the storytelling function of the camera, which becomes the superior narrative to that of the original crime.

As a parodic exercise, Evidence Locker draws attention to a broader critique of surveillance systems; how CCTV operates as a form of narrative construction in its reliance upon a pre-existing story of criminality. Understanding surveillance in this way suggests that CCTV, by its very mode of operation, allows for the construction of alternative narratives to those it was engineered to produce. It is by becoming camera operators that we, the audience, entertain the operative capacity at the heart of contemporary modes of surveillance. If criminal detection relies on the putting-together of fragments, then these fragments can also be edited, rearranged, and operated differently to refuse a singular conclusion of events.

The storytelling function of the CCTV camera is, in fact, already predisposed to multiple narratives because of its voyeuristic implications. The classical detective plot is organised according to a libidinal economy, intent on uncovering the truth to reach narrative climax. The vision produced by the CCTV gaze is a fantasy one, but this fantasy mode—elicited through the temporal dynamics of anticipation and angst—also allows for a different kind of fantasy: a romantic one. If the camera operator’s vision is oriented towards self-pleasure, then it is by prolonging and ultimately denying the satisfaction of the viewer’s lust for a story that Magid flatters, flirts back with, and effectively hijacks the surveillance gaze. 

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SURVEILLANT ASSEMBLAGES

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Since the proliferation of CCTV systems in the 1980s and 1990s, surveillance has become a defining characteristic of modernity, combining the technology-induced scopophilia of the present with the regulatory desires of the state. “The panoptic urge,” argues David Lyon, “is to make everything visible; it is the desire and the drive towards a total gaze” (44). The idea of a “total gaze” is, however, a fallacy. As surveillance scholars Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson point out, CCTV systems are composed of multiple cameras, technologies, and operators, constituting uneasy “surveillant assemblage[s]” (4). There is no singular Big Brother watching you, but rather thousands of roving eyes.

Evidence Locker not only makes visible the seemingly innocuous structures of the urban landscape but highlights the fragmentary optics they produce. Magid presents CCTV footage taken from different cameras and angles, resulting in a variety of compositions. In the first image I described of Magid smoking outside a café, she is captured by two different cameras which present the subject in alternative poses. Whilst the CCTV gaze aspires towards a coherent narrative through the imaging process, the resulting aesthetic form is in fact more subjective than it appears to be at first glance, influenced by factors such as zoom, focus, and biometric data. From close-up, to wide, to long shot angles, it is by bringing multiple CCTV cameras into conversation that Magid exposes the inconsistency of the surveillance image.

After all, CCTV footage only makes sense when organised into a narrative, the differences between each image homogenised into a causal chain of events. The eye of the beholder creates a stylistic consistency between each image. As filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer argues, the perceived “revealing” power of photographs belies their obfuscating function: “they make visible only fragments,” which cannot be homogenised into a complete whole (314). Instead, spectators are forced to “make up stories to fill these gaps in knowledge” (315). Evidence Locker identifies the gaps in surveillance as crucial modes through which the state produces stories that infer criminality upon the subject of the gaze. At the same time, it is the fragmentary form of surveillance which makes the occurrence of multiple, contested explanations possible.

At first glance, Magid’s recordings reproduce the aesthetic that has come to typify CCTV recordings: low resolution, cold colours, high tonal contrast, interspersed with moments of glitch and blur. These images can be woven together to create a consistent narrative. Yet at the same time, each still reflects a variety of hues produced by the camera: in the initial footage of Magid’s character, her skin appears green-tinged, whereas in another image she is blue-toned. These colours work subconsciously to infer a different set of connotations; the woman in red oscillates between melancholy, jealousy, anger, and lust, each contributing to a devious stereotype. On the one hand, the modern surveillance gaze lends itself to generalisations, amalgamating disparate images of Magid into a singular character. At the same time, the incomplete gaze of CCTV cannot help but produce multiple possible narratives, transforming the woman into a waxy chimera. Instead of becoming clearer to the viewer, the image becomes even more confounded as her appearance is reproduced and multiplied through technology, begging the question: what, exactly, are we looking at? 

The camera’s voyeuristic eye is suspicious by default: anyone who is aware of and resists the regime of the surveillance gaze can be labelled as a criminal. Magid’s artwork suggests how the visual schema of surveillance reproduces criminal identities as a compensatory mechanism in response to its own gaps in knowledge. However, it is by playing with the camera’s uncertainty that Magid also suggests that multiple narratives are possible at once. In one clipping, Magid extracts a moment where she has been put in focus and the figures around her are blurred, identifying a clear target. Visibility does not only vary between different recordings, but within the same piece of footage. The camera’s decision to focus solely on the woman in red is less evidence of her guilt than it is an indication of the camera’s arbitrary detection mechanisms. It could just as easily be a different passer-by brought to attention by the camera’s gaze, predicating criminality upon a moment of aberrance, deviation, or glitch. As Foucault argues of the panoptic gaze, “power has its principle not so much in a person as in the concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes” (202), implying that any body could, from the right angle, become a criminal body. Within the same image, there can be more than one truth depending not just on how the camera is oriented, but also on the resulting operative work that is done when such images are looked at and interpreted. Dressed in her red coat, Magid’s character performs a criminal archetype: she is seductive, mysterious, a suspect. In other words, this woman is not to be trusted. Yet in the absence of any real evidence, the accusatory eye of the CCTV camera becomes the object of the audience’s distrust, no longer able to claim epistemological authority over the truth.

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SURVEILLANT STORIES

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To tell the story of crime, surveillance systems rely on narrative construction. In Evidence Locker, Magid turns herself into a character who performs for the incomplete gaze of CCTV. As Jonathan Finn notes, CCTV’s “effects on crime are negligible”; most of what is recorded is surplus material (141). Through its ubiquitous presence in the urban cityscape, surveillance technology constructs its own legitimacy as a defence against an always-already criminal space. By recording mundane scenes, the camera turns the everyday into a suspicious landscape ripe for public disorder and a stage for crime drama. 

The narrative operation performed by surveillance systems is a form which crucially links the mechanisations of the CCTV gaze to the classical detective narrative of literary fiction. Peter Hühn identifies a recurrent narrative structure found in the detective novel: “the first story (the crime) happened in the past and is—insofar as it is hidden—absent from the present; the second story (the investigation) happens in the present and consists of uncovering the first story” (451). Confronted with this “absent” event, the viewer is compelled to fill this epistemological gap with knowledge. According to Hühn, the act of crime destabilises the established order, not because the crime itself has taken place, but rather because the occurrence of criminal acts discredits the governing power of social norms, laying bare the tenuous basis upon which the social contract is based. Furthermore, this destabilisation is exacerbated by the inability of both law enforcement and citizens to “discover and tell the story of the crime”, identified by Hühn as a fundamentally “narrative incapability” (my emphasis) (452). The act of narrative construction works to reaffirm the social order, yet at the same time betrays this order as a socially constructed fantasy reliant on an arbitrary set of norms.

Comparing the operation of modern CCTV systems to detective fiction exposes an inherent paradox within existing critiques of the panoptic gaze. Scholars of surveillance studies, such as Haggerty and Ericson, have exposed surveillance systems as amalgamated fragments rather than coherent totalities, unveiling the piecemeal and uncertain basis of the contemporary police state. Criminal detection has, however, always relied on the piecing-together of clues in its reliance on fragmentary knowledge. Rather than delegitimising surveillance, the gleaning of evidence works to restore faith in these systems. 

In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensationalist Victorian novel, Lady Audley’s Secret (1962), the character Robert resembles an early iteration of the police detective. In seeking to uncover Lady Audley’s crimes, Robert claims with perverse determination: “link by link I have put together the chain of evidence” (213). Much like the footage captured by modern-day forms of surveillance, Robert’s “chain of evidence” is largely made up of visual clues, such as the “wicked look” in Lady Audley’s eye (57). More specifically, these clues are only evidence because they point to traits inconsistent with normative social behaviours; as such, the identification and eventual eradication of these characters work to reaffirm the existing order.

Hühn argues that “by reintegrating the aberrant event” of the crime into the detective story, “the narrative construction restores the disrupted social order,” re-legitimising the figures of law enforcement (451). In other words, the discovery of the crime—achieved through the amalgamation of disparate evidentiary fragments—takes precedence over the incomplete methodology through which this conclusion is achieved. The unsolved gap represented by the crime itself, exposing the inadequacy of the social contract, is forgotten about, as the dominant narrative turns to focus on the authorities’ ability to recover the unknown. In Braddon’s novel, Lady Audley represents a threat to the Victorian paradigm of domestic femininity through her desire for social mobility. Robert’s achievement is not the resolution of this problem, but rather the discovery of it, functioning similarly to CCTV in that both aim to capture a crime that has already happened. What matters more is not that the crime itself took place, or how it was discovered, but rather that a narrative is produced to explain it, thus reincorporating the absent event back into the social whole. 

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SURVEILLANCE IS SEXY

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The question then becomes: how does Magid’s work refuse the restoration of social order by evading the satisfaction of a conclusion? A central fear that Mary Elizabeth Braddon explores is not only the phenomenon of crime itself, but the possibility that female deviance goes undetected by the male gaze. By driving away on a motorbike, Magid escapes the capacity for the camera operator to ever fully know and uncover the truth. If the detective story reaches its apotheosis in the bringing-together of the fragmentary, then Magid’s story is deliberately left unresolved, the threads of evidence failing to weave together into a definitive answer. 

In presenting her CCTV footage as a series of events culminating in a dramatic escape, Magid also engages with a feature present in Braddon’s early detective fiction: the libidinal basis of narrative construction. Robert’s piecing-together of evidence is accompanied by a highly eroticised desire to uncover and know Lady Audley’s body and mind, seen to be hidden from the male viewer. Magid’s love letters to the operators of Liverpool’s CCTV cameras highlights the voyeuristic pleasure involved in looking, which is intensified by the sexual gratification afforded by a linear narrative as each recording flirts closer to the truth. In his article “Surveillance is Sexy”, David Bell notes that citizens regularly “flirt […], tease, strip” in front of the camera (204). Bell questions if flirting could provide a way of resisting surveillance, confronting head-on the voyeuristic dynamic between spectator and subject. Magid, in her gendered performance as a seductive criminal archetype, and in her deferral of a satisfying conclusion, does indeed flirt back with the CCTV gaze, playing with the shifting modalities of concealment and exposure.

Magid’s appeal to the gaze of the camera operator and, by extension, her exhibition audience, ground her artwork in the pleasure of being watched. If, as John Berger argues, “men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at,” (47) then the act of self-perception has the opportunity to hijack the male gaze even as it remains limited by its framework. This motion of moving both towards and away from the surveillance camera is replicated across contemporary consumer engagement with CCTV and digital trackers. Across UK supermarkets, it is now commonplace to see AI recognition technology used at self-checkouts, wherein large screens present customers with footage of themselves packaging their items. The fact that such technology has become popular with Gen Z customers as an occasion for a mirror selfie does, however, ironically suggest that surveillance can become co-opted as part of the myriad “sexual affordances” (Hearn 42) made available by new imaging systems.  

Similarly, the experience of being watched can create alternative affective bonds that defy the conventional relationship between law authority and subject. Looking through albums of Black nineteenth-century convicts, Tina Campt notes that such images “have a sensuousness that, to me, felt almost illicit” (90). The recording of images involves an intimate knowledge of bodily details and personal histories that cannot simply be morphed into a criminal type, no matter the regulatory intention of the images’ producers. After looking repeatedly at Magid, the gaze softens and takes on a certain fondness, a parasocial familiarity that undermines the supposed objectivity of reconnaissance. Performance artist and photographer Sophie Calle experimented with this effect when she posed as a maid and photographed the contents of hotel rooms in Venice. The Hotel, Room 28 (1981) includes pictures of well-worn shoes and rumpled sheets, soft from the imprint of their user’s bodies. Calle’s gaze may be intrusive, but it is also a loving one, eliciting a haptic knowledge derived from the overlap of public and private selfhood. Another example is the popular “FBI agent meme” (Radulovic), in which social media users joke about being spied upon through their laptop cameras. Jasmine Erdener notes that the satirical acceptance of constant surveillance has reorganised the relationship between government official and citizen into one of “surveillant care” (228). Far from fearing such an intrusion into domestic privacy, the FBI agent is imagined as a nurturing figure who flatters us with his watchful eye. Voyeuristic surveillance hence becomes not simply a desiring action but a desirable act, as users revel in the possibilities of being known by another.

Magid does not only enjoy being loved by Big Brother but suggests that the surveillant assemblage can itself become the object of desire when looked at and displayed through her artwork. In 2002, Magid approached the Amsterdam Police Department and offered to bejewel their CCTV cameras with rhinestones. By transforming usually overlooked features of the urban landscape into ostentatious visual display, Magid turned surveillance technology into a fetish, something glimmering that could be looked at and lusted upon. In Evidence Locker, Magid similarly fashions the CCTV camera as a romantic partner whose gaze she lovingly reciprocates. 

Perhaps a question left wanting by Magid’s flirtation is: what does it mean to love the thing that wants you dead, absent, erased from the public sphere? Magid escapes, but not everyone can be so lucky. In the UK, as is now commonplace in Europe and North America, people of colour are disproportionately targeted by surveillance. A 2017 report by The Guardian revealed that Black people in Britain were eight times more likely to be affected by police stop and search (Dodd). In 2025, campaigners against the Metropolitan Police’s use of facial recognition at Notting Hill Carnival, an annual celebration of London’s Caribbean community, noted that facial recognition technology has proven to be racially biased against women and people of colour (Syal). In Evidence Locker, the danger of Magid’s project is subdued by her own racial visibility; the camera is kinder to white bodies. Nevertheless, identity photos as a medium contain, as Campt argues, “the paradoxical capacity […] to rupture the sovereign gaze of the regimes that created them by refusing the very terms of photographic subjection they were engineered to produce” (5). 

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Flirting with the camera offers a mode of hijacking the surveillance gaze and turning it back upon itself as something we, as viewers, should be suspicious of. Produced in the infancy of modern image culture, Magid’s artwork is even more pertinent today as a critique of the totalising vision of CCTV systems. Fredric Jameson predicted the postmodern aesthetic produced by capitalism to be one resembling “a glossy skin, a stereoscopic illusion, a rush of filmic images without density” (34). Surveillant systems reproduce these filmic images and assemble them into a narrative which allows for the restoration of normativity, smoothing over the gaps in the social fabric. However, paying attention to the “skin” of these images—the points at which they soften, fray, and multiply—suggests how flirtation may elicit a different interpretation of events. Flirtation does not only confound the voyeuristic gaze of the camera, but suggests how operating the camera differently allows such technology to produce alternative narratives in spite of its own engineering.

The same fragments, glitches, and blurs that destabilise the CCTV gaze also allow for moments of fluidity, which can be rearranged and assembled differently outside of the optical regime of the police state. The very precarity of such images may be central to their regimental power; however, precarity also continually destabilises this power through fabulation. It is in the image’s storytelling capacity that the narrative of crime can be written as much as it can be unwritten, edited, avoided, and prolonged, ultimately refusing to satisfy the camera’s lust for truth.

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