The camera is new and the wall is not, and for the first few weeks that is the only thing you notice about it.
Everything else on this wall has been weathered into agreement. The brick has gone soft at the edges. The door has been repainted so many times that the panel lines are nearly filled. There is a rust bloom under the hinge and a tide line about three feet up where the snow sits every winter. All of it has been there long enough to have stopped announcing itself.
Then a grey plastic dome, bolted on at eye height plus four feet, with the drill dust still on the brick below the anchors.
I painted the dust. It is a pale scatter on the darker brick, maybe a hand’s width, and it will be gone with the first rain. That scatter is the only evidence in the picture that this object arrived rather than grew, and I gave it more attention than it probably deserves, because in a month there will be no way to tell from the ground how long the camera has been there. Buildings absorb these things very quickly. Within a year it will look as though the wall came with it.
The red diode is on. It is roughly two millimetres across in the painting and it is the warmest thing in the frame by a wide margin, and I want to be precise about it now because it is going to matter enormously later. It is on. That is all it is telling you. Ten paintings from now it will still be on and it will still be telling you exactly that much and no more.
The conduit is the other honest part. It comes out of the housing and runs down the brick in a grey line to a junction below the frame, and it is a little crooked. Somebody stood on a ladder in the cold and did an adequate job. There is no conspiracy in this picture. There is a small business owner who got tired of something happening behind his building, and an installer with a drill, and a Tuesday.
The door beneath is closed. Nobody is in this painting. Nobody is in any of the next nine either.