On Google Street View you can take a virtual walk down almost any street in the developed world – and it's inspiring some fascinating new art
Sat 14 Jul 2012 19.01 EDT First published on Sat 14 Jul 2012 19.01 EDT
9 Rua Pereira da Costa, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil 2010 Jon Rafman is one of a new breed of street photographers sourcing images from Google Street View to create fascinating series of work. Rafman has suggested that it might be the ultimate conclusion of the medium: "it's almost as if the camera is this modern God that sees everything, but doesn't make any moral judgements."
It was an obsessive search for a Google Street View picture of a recent girlfriend that first sent Rafman trawling through the images. Realising he had no photos of her, and remembering a holiday in Italy where he was watching her from the first floor balcony and saw a Google car drive by, he spent weeks looking for an image of her. It became, he says, “one of my iconic images"
8 Rue Valette, Pompertuzat, Midi- Pyrenees, France 2011 Rafman set up and curates the site 9-eyes.com, an online repository of Street View scenes. "I'm trying to find the sublime in this post-internet age we live in."
D52, Blaru, France 2011 "These are photographs that no one took and memories that no one has," says Rafman. "By reintroducing the human gaze, I reassert the uniqueness of the individual."
Paris street view photojournalist Michael Wolf received an honourable mention in the 2011 world press photo awards for A Series of Unfortunate Events - a collection of photos he had taken of images, or crops of images, from Google Street View displayed on his computer. He was first lured onto Google Street View while living in Paris and looking for ways of viewing this mausoleum-like city that avoided the usual cliches. He became fascinated with the incidental events and actions that Google captures – crashes, brawls, mishaps, or as here, a moment of interaction with the neutral camera
Photograph: Michael Wolf/Courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London
Paris street view "In the beginning I found it amazing that if one looked enough one could find almost anything – accidents, heart attacks, people giving you the finger," says Wolf. "It was just an incredible cross-section of events. But then I just realised it's a matter of odds: you will have everything from a woman birthing a child to a guy dying on the street."
Photograph: Michael Wolf/Courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London
Detroit, MI (2009), 2010 Working in the tradition of the great American documentarists Robert Frank and Walker Evans, Doug Rickard explores the forgotten hinterlands of urban America. He says finding Google Street View was a kind of epiphany: "I felt the same sort of freedom as I would walking around the street."
Photograph: Doug Rickard/Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
Chicago, IL (2007), 2011 Rickard plays with colour saturation and contrast on the images he selects. "Colours are simultaneously enhanced and drained," says the critic Geoff Dyer. "Sometimes the sky gets rinsed out, other times it has vestiges of the turquoise ache of the Super-8 of old. All of which contributes to the sense we are seeing ghost towns in the process of formation."
Photograph: Doug Rickard/Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
Baltimore, MD (2008), 2011 Rickard says his work turns Google Street View into a "public poetry" and explores places in the US where "the American dream was shattered or impossible to achieve."
Photograph: Doug Rickard/Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
