The Nine Eyes of Google Street View

Yesterday, Art Fag City posted the latest installment of IMG MGMT, their annual image-based artist essay series. In "The Nine eyes of Google Street View", artist Jon Rafman posts selections from his collection of Google Street View screenshots, exploring the range of culturally meaningful (not just informational) images captured by the nine-lensed Google cameras. His collection covers a lot of ground, but it's all strangely cinematic, capturing bleak urbanity, perfect rainbows, armed robberies, and surreal landscapes equally well.

An excerpt:

Within the panoramas, I can locate images of gritty urban life reminiscent of hard-boiled American street photography. Or, if I prefer, I can find images of rural Americana that recall photography commissioned by the Farm Securities Administration during the depression. I can seek out postcard-perfect shots that capture what Cartier-Bresson titled "the decisive moment," as if I were a photojournalist responding instantaneously to an emerging event. At other times, I have been mesmerized by the sense of nostalgia, yearning, and loss in these images—qualities that evoke old family snapshots.

And finally, I couldn't mention this article without adding my personal favorite to the collection, an unabashed pair of warriors in Pittsburgh:

via today and tomorrow

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