Street Views as Art

Montreal artist Jon Raufman uses Google Street Views as his raw material, finding images that capture unintentional moments, like a house on fire or a nude bather.

1 minute read

December 17, 2009, 8:00 AM PST

By Tim Halbur


Raufman writes, "Initially, I was attracted to the noisy amateur aesthetic of the raw images. Street Views evoked an urgency I felt was present in earlier street photography. With its supposedly neutral gaze, the Street View photography had a spontaneous quality unspoiled by the sensitivities or agendas of a human photographer. It was tempting to see the images as a neutral and privileged representation of reality-as though the Street Views, wrenched from any social context other than geospatial contiguity, were able to perform true docu-photography, capturing fragments of reality stripped of all cultural intentions."

Wednesday, December 16, 2009 in googlestreetviews.com

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