data is everyday life

“Fascination with the banal. (...) Sociology of the everyday.”

“‘The daily papers talk about everything except daily.’ (Perec) The daily, is presumed to be by definition trivial and not worthy of attention.”

“The point is not to discover the new, the grandiose, the striking, the exceptional or the unexpected, but rather to (re)discover, or perhaps see well for the first time, the realm of what which is already familiar” “few of us give enough attention to what is truly daily in our daily lives, the ‘banal habits’ settings and events of which our lives almost entirely consist.”

Sophie arranges herself to be followed by hiring a detective to photograph her clandestinely. “To provide photographic evidence of my own existence.”

“In all of this, Calle subverts the traditional practices of ethnography in fascinating ways, by deploying them in new settings and for unfamiliar purposes. In the end, as Suzanne Kuchler notes on her commentary of Calle’s work, the techniques of surveillance work to draw attention to the ever changing viewpoints of both the surveiller and the surveilled. Calle’s supposedly “documentary” photographers, thus, often ‘obscure rather than reveal their object, betraying more about the follower than the followed’, and all of her work challenges us to think in new ways about the nature of what we think as documentary evidence’.”