Surveillance is a practice performed by people who are looking and seeing; looking and seeing are learned skills
Looking at surveillance as a practice performed by people roots this project in human experience. Although surveillance uses tools, these tools only augment, and do not replace, the human capacity to sense and to make sense.
As a part of this rooting in human experience, sensing and making sense—in the case of surveillance photography specifically we might say looking and seeing—are learned skills. No one comes into the world as a surveillance operator—surveillance operators are trained, as are humans in any other job (see "Surveillance is a job," below).
Surveillance is a job
Looking at surveillance as a job—like any other job—enables us to understand it through analogy to other jobs with which we may be more familiar.
Surveillance is conducted by bureaucracies
Similarly to looking at surveillance as a job, looking at surveillance as a function of bureaucracies enables us to understand its operations in the context of what bureaucracies do in general.
This is particularly true with regards to understanding training for surveillance. The way that a bureaucracy trains its members to do one task is often if not mostly the way that that bureaucracy trains its members to do other tasks. A slightly weaker but still strong statement is that there will often be similarities between how two separate bureaucracies of similar size or similar function train their members for the same tasks.
These insights can enable us to structurally understand what a day of surveillance training might look like, what a week of surveillance training might look like, and so on.