![]() ![]() “Cropping, adjusting, and forming a body of work out of them completely transforms these images into something that can be beautiful, terrifying and also insightful. “In its raw form, satellite imagery can be quite dull,” says Mishka Henner, an artist who often works with Google’s images. ![]() Through meticulous research, framing, grabbing and reformatting, photographers themselves are assigning photos artistic value, in much the same way they do when shooting, toning or retouching a raw file or an analogue negative. The machines and cameras used to collect them have no discretion, much less artistic influence. Google’s Street View images aren’t a commentary on the world, but are surveillance photos taken for the practical purposes of just showing us places we may not be able to visit. While critics bemoan the trend of artists using Google imagery in their works, the artistic appropriation of photos is as old as photography itself, employed by everyone from the Surrealists to the post-modern Pictures Generation of the late 1970s. The massive and growing archive has spawned a virtual world of images like we’ve never seen before in the history of photography-and its accessibility has inspired a new generation of photographers who are using the tool to document the world while simultaneously redefining the boundaries, quite literally, of contemporary art photography. Google Street View cars-along with snowmobiles, giant tricycles and Trekkers–have covered more than five million unique miles of road since the project began, making tens of millions of still images in even the most far off places on the map, such as Antarctica. Now, five years later, Google has recorded 360-degree photographs of streets in more than 3,000 cities in 43 countries around the world. The idea of capturing images of the entire world from the perspective of the street was revolutionary, if not a little insane. When Google Street View started as an experiment in 2007, the company sent SUVs equipped with cameras, GPS and lasers to collect its first pictures. ![]()
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