‘Wired’ (1980) was made as part of a series of images in Camerawork Magazine that related to an essay by the great historian E.P. Thompson, who wrote ‘The Making of the English Working Class.’ Thompson wrote about Cruise missiles coming to Britain and how they would cause an increase in police power and surveillance. ‘Wired’ was a very early attempt by Kennard to confront issues surrounding surveillance, which in the 1980s was done via tape recorders and telephones and is now much more sophisticated, hidden and insidious. Kennard had real experience of surveillance at that time due to his role as a night telephonist at a telephone exchange. He directly understood how phones could be tapped, the underlying technology of it and the danger, which can be seen through the barbed wire connecting the tape recorder to the telephone in the image.