Are We All Street Photographers Now?

Camera's are far more accessible now than they ever have been. With the rise of smartphones, almost everybody is carrying a camera around in their pocket. Able to snap photographs whenever they choose. Gone are the days of street photographers being the only ones out and about with a 35mm film camera. 

With social media being so widely used, photographs can be shared all over the internet within seconds of them being taken. Some believe that photography is no longer sacred, that it has lost its value. I think in terms of street photography, we are all street photographers now, whether intentional or not. However I do believe that street photography can still be an art form even with technology changing so rapidly. 

From my research I have found out that people are using Google Street View as an art form. People are becoming street photographers without leaving their own homes. From the advances in technology the term 'street photography' has been reinvented and reinterpreted. 

John Rafman

Jon Rafman is an artist, filmmaker, and essayist. He explores the impact of technology on contemporary consciousness. His artwork has gained international attention and will be exhibited this year at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. He is widely known for exhibiting found images from Google Street View (9-Eyes) . Jon Rafman's photo project The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, named after the nine lenses mounted on a Google Street View car, collects the strange and beautiful images they capture by accident from around the world. 

Rafman’s work focuses on technology and digital media, and emphasizes the ways in which it distances us from ourselves. He offers a way to look at the melancholy in our modern social interactions, communities and virtual realities from an accessible place of humour and irony. His films and art are hauntingly evocative and utilize extremely personal moments to reveal how pop-culture ephemera and advertising media shape our desires and threaten to define our being.

He’s explored the identities and history of some of our most common virtual worlds— Google Earth, Google Street View and Second Life, though Rafman rarely takes a moral stance toward the messaging behind his art, it consistently asks us to evaluate what it means to be human in the context of these new and ambiguous digital realms. Jon Rafman celebrates and critiques contemporary culture, while at the same time revealing the origins of modern loneliness and alienation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Rafman (Date Accessed 22/03/15)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/picture-galleries/9096610/The-Nine-Eyes-of-Google-Street-View-a-photo-

project-by-Jon-Rafman.html The Telegraph (Date Accessed 22/03/15)

Mishka Henner

Mishka Henner (born 1976 in Brussels, Belgium) is an artist living and working in Manchester, England. His work has featured in several surveys of contemporary artists working with photography in the internet age. He has been described by some as a modern-day Duchamp for his appropriation of image-rich technologies including Google Earth, Google Street View, and YouTube, and for his adoption of print-on-demand as a means to bypass traditional publishing models.

Although he trained as a documentary photographer, Henner, 37, doesn’t “take” photos – he finds them. Two years ago he was nominated for the Deutsche Borse photography prize for a survey of prostitution sites made using images found on Google Street View. The pictures in his latest series, Beef and Oil, began as satellite images found on the internet of either oilfields or mass cattle-rearing operations known as feedlots, located across Kansas, Texas and California. They appear in an exhibition of Henner’s work opening in London this week, and have been nominated for this year’s Prix Pictet, the international award for photography on the theme of sustainability.

No Man's Land represents isolated women occupying the margins of southern European environments. Shot entirely with Google Street View, Henner's method of online intelligence-gathering results in an unsettling reflection on surveillance, voyeurism and the contemporary landscape.

http://www.mishkahenner.com (Date Accessed 22/03/15)

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/may/23/mishka-henner-less-americains The Guardian, Sean O'Hagan

23/05/12

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography/10813540/Mishka-Henner-a-Duchamp-for-our-times.htm 

(Date Accessed 22/03/15)

Michael Wolf

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)

Google Street View

With the rise of Google Street View in the past few years, we have begun to question its ethics. Is it an invasion of privacy? Are there some things we wish not to be published on the internet but are anyway? Google Street View has even become a form of photography, now considered in the art world. 

On March 12th 2013, Google agreed to pay a fine of $7 million for collecting personal data during recording for its Google Maps Street View feature. Google's mobile vans, in addition to filming "street views," were also collecting emails, medical and finance records, and passwords from unprotected wireless networks as they passed by. As the internet is becoming more and more prominent, have we lost what little privacy we already had? 

In the posts following I will be looking into Google Street View as a means of photography. I have already looked at Doug Rickard, who used screenshots of Google Street View in an exhibition at the MOMA. Can you now be considered a Street Photographer even from home?

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/05/googles-street-view-engineer-knew-data-collection-was-questionable/ 
Arts Technica, Casey Johnson 06/05/12 (Date Accessed 22/03/15)

What Does it Mean to be a Street Photographer? | Doug Rickard

Doug Rickard (American, born 1968) studied United States history and sociology at the University of California, San Diego, before moving to photography. He has drawn on this background in research for his series A New American Picture, which focuses on places in the United States where unemployment is high and educational opportunities are few.

 On a virtual road trip, Rickard located these sites remotely using the Street View feature of the website Google Maps, which has mapped and photographed every street in the country. Scrutinizing the Google Maps pictures, he composed images on his computer screen, which he then photographed using a digital camera. The resulting pictures—digitally manipulated to remove the Google watermark and cropped to a panoramic format—comment on poverty and racial equity in the United States, the bounty of images on the web, and issues of personal privacy.

Rickard has amassed several terabytes of Street View images — nearly 15,000 shots captured, labeled, and stored. From that massive stash, he selected only about 80 images for “A New American Picture,” of which a selection is on view at MoMA. To give you an idea of the voracity of Rickard’s Street View search, he has virtually explored almost every neighborhood in the “broken” portions of Atlanta, New Orleans, Jersey City, Durham, Houston, Watts (in Los Angeles) and Camden. 

He has also explored, inch by inch, the smaller towns of America with names like Lovington, Waco, Artesia, Dothan and Macon. What he looks for are images that carry what he calls a certain “poetry” of subject matter, color, and story — a story described in part by him as “the inverse of the American Dream.” And if the image isn’t “perfect” according to the elements of Rickard’s demands, it’s a no-go. Everything in the image has to be composed, via the camera motion of Street View, to his very subjective, personal, and exacting standards.

Does this constitute as street photography? This poses many questions about what it means to be a street photographer, are we all street photographers?

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/jul/14/google-street-view-new-photography The Guardian, Geoff Dyer 14/07/12 (Date Accessed 22/03/15)

http://designobserver.com/article.php?id=32028 The Design Observer Group John Foster 01/01/12 (Date Accessed 22/03/15)

Phillip-Lorca diCorcia

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (born 1951) is an American photographer. DiCorcia alternates between informal snapshots and iconic quality staged compositions that often have a baroque theatricality.

Using a carefully planned staging, he takes everyday occurrences beyond the realm of banality, trying to inspire in his picture's spectators an awareness of the psychology and emotion contained in real-life situations. His work could be described as documentary photography mixed with the fictional world of cinema and advertising, which creates a powerful link between reality, fantasy and desire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip-Lorca_diCorcia (Date Accessed 22/03/15)