Michael Wolf (born 1954) is a German artist and photographer who lives and works in Hong Kong and Paris. In several series, such as Paris Street View, Manhattan Street View, and A Series of Unfortunate Events, Wolf took photographs of Google Street View scenes on his computer screen. Wolf compared his method of finding interesting scenes online to those of a street photographer walking around in a city. He has called his Street View series "a statement about art."
The Street View photographs were characterized by pixelation and image noise which were compared with techniques used by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol in their art. The work led to discussion of how the automatically-taken Google Street View images affected the "decisive moment" concept of Henri Cartier-Bresson; nevertheless, the photographs were said to contain "some mystery" in that they were "hard to interpret."Some of Wolf's photographs resemble recognized classics of photography such as The Kiss by Robert Doisneau.
Wolf won an honorable mention in Daily Life in the 2011 World Press Photo competition for his A Series of Unfortunate Events work. The award was controversial because some people were of the opinion that the appropriation of Google Street View screens did not constitute photojournalism.
"In the beginning what I found amazing was that if one looked enough, one could find almost anything. So many situations – accidents, heart attacks, bicycle crashes, dogs crapping, people giving you the finger – it was just an incredible cross-section of events. It seemed serendipitous 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. And when we walk through the city we're always only in one place and one time but that car is seeing every place in one time."
Does he feel there's anything sinister about Street View?
"People always try and get me to confess to seeing Google as this evil all-seeing eye in the sky which invaded our privacy, but I didn't see it that way at all – I think Google should be awarded some sort of documentary photo prize."
"People accused me of being a stupid lazy photographer who didn't want to get his ass on the street," he laughs. "It started a big discussion, which is important, because every time you push the limits of something, people talk about it, people think and then the next person will go even farther. That's how we make progress."
http://photomichaelwolf.com (Date Accessed 22/03/15)
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