google street photography

 Compared to the constantly changing cityscapes of Asia, Paris was an open-air mausoleum that had remained largely unaltered for more than a hundred years. Haussmannisation had radically transformed Paris in the mid-to-late 19th century but pockets of the "old" Paris photographed by Eugène Atget will be familiar to any contemporary visitor. Atget made his living by providing "documents for artists", and Wolf was alert to the connection between Atget's painstaking survey of the city and the possibility of deploying Street View's comprehensive – if uncomprehending – kerb-crawl for his own artistic ends.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/jul/14/google-street-view-new-photography


"The problem with Paris," says photojournalist and artist Michael Wolf, "is that it's been photographed a gazillion times – it's full of cliches. I thought that instead of going out and looking at the city in real time, I'd just explore the city using Google Street View."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/jul/14/google-muse-street-photographers-interviews


and the photos

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2012/jul/15/photography-google-street-view

the ' photogrpahers' quotes



"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." michael wolf


When he found Street View it was like an epiphany. "I felt the same sort of freedom as I would walking around the street: it was this strange, hybrid animal that was in between appropriated images, like Richard Prince does, and then traditional street photography, like [Garry] Winogrand did."  doug rickard

A New American Picture comprises images taken from the streets of the USA's small towns – places where "the American dream was shattered or impossible to achieve".



"Street View might be the ultimate conclusion of the medium of photography: "It's almost as if the Street View camera were this modern god that sees everything, observes all, but doesn't make any moral judgments, doesn't step into history, is just purely observing with its neutral robotic gaze," jon rafman