Watching You: A Novel

Photographs symbolize the various, unreliable perspectives of the characters as they try to understand one another. They capture specific viewpoints and moments in time. Without their proper context, they mislead people.

Photography particularly connects the characters of Frances and Freddie as they spy on the neighborhood and each other’s families. Frances takes pictures on her phone, trying to document the gang stalking behavior that she imagines surrounds her. Her surveillance is in response to her delusion, but the pictures are no more or less reliable for that. Her picture of Rebecca is a key piece of evidence leading to Rebecca’s arrest. Freddie uses an expensive camera with powerful zoom in his quest to document and understand the people around him. When Rebecca hacks into his family’s computer, she believes the pictures, often featuring teenage girls, belong to Tom, evidence of ongoing predatory behavior.

On the other hand, Freddie’s pictures help him to appreciate the humanity of his subject and the violation of his voyeurism. He takes a picture of Romola and photoshops her head onto a naked woman. He starts to masturbate but then sees “something in the eyes of the disembodied head [...] He saw a human being looking at him.