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Let the record show that I have been surveilled -- not by a hostile state, but by Knihobot, the Czech online bookseller, whose Facebook ads seem to know my reading habits better than I do. A few months ago it served me an ad for a book on postwar Viennese architecture and I bought it before I'd finished scrolling. Last month it got me again, with something it apparently knew I couldn't resist: Prague Through the Lens of the Secret Police, a collection of StB surveillance photographs published by the Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (2009). I clicked "buy" on that one too (though this time, at least, the surveillance being marketed to me was several decades out of date).

At first glance, "Prague Through the Lens ..." resembles any good compilation of historic street photography: a riveting collection of apparently random faces and places from a time that no longer exists. But there's a twist. The photographers weren't artists at all, but agents working for the Czechoslovak secret police, the StB. Their subjects were, in the terminology of surveillance operations, "objects:" ordinary men and women whom StB cameramen had been assigned to follow, watch and document. That knowledge changes the way you look at the pictures.

Since the book arrived a few weeks ago, I've found myself paging through it again and again, studying the faces and trying to imagine the lives behind them. There's an undeniably voyeuristic quality to the photographs: we get to watch people who had no idea they were being watched. At the same time, many of the pictures are unexpectedly beautiful. The StB photographers were gathering evidence, not making art, yet decades later their images can resemble carefully observed street photography.

For me, though, the fascination goes beyond either the aesthetics or the voyeurism. While I'm not one of the "objects" featured in this particular book, I very well could have been. I was also in the StB's file.