Sunset Boulevard (re)photographic series: Image captures from Google Street View
A new form of landscape photography has emerged in the Era of Google, one in which I would term “screen-shot” or “virtual” (re)photography. It involves capturing imagery that has already previously been captured (or created) and is now available for viewing on a digital-generated screen surface.
Here the process is unpacked specifically in regards to Google
Maps Street View. Google maps and its API’s (Application Program Interface)
have permeated our visually-dominated culture in a myriad of ways on the web,
on mobile devices, and in GPS navigation units, with storehouses of real-time
accessible information catering to practically every interest and inquiry. Using
this eponymous mapping application which combines GPS satellite and street
mapping with the geographical imagery associated with the map, landscape or
urban-scape photography has never been easier. [1]
For one thing, it is no longer necessary to be physically
present at a location in order to capture an image of a particular place. True,
when capturing Google imagery through screen shots, the image capture is going
to be dated to the time of the initial Google photographic event - the moment when
the Google photographing team drove (or walked by) with their special 360
degree cameras taking photos. These images will eventually be processed, stitched together,
and then linked to their respective GPS locations for display on the Google
maps site. So, in some places the images may be several years old.
But in that sense, all photography is dated from the instant
the image is taken. It is a window into a slice of the Real World of a certain
place at a certain time, one that can never be exactly (re)produced again simply
because of the passage of time that can cause the scene to change ever so
slightly even in a couple seconds.
Admittedly, when working with Google Street View, one is
restricted to only capturing imagery that Google has made
available.(Additionally, there is the downside of the images overlaid with
Google’s little information boxes and symbols.) Many sites not covered yet or
currently inaccessible to Google’s ground-based photographic technology haven’t
been photographed and thus cannot be (re)captured. Google compensates for this
somewhat by allowing independent photographic uploads with GPS locations to be
pinpointed on the Google maps.
Even though the professional or amateur photographer who
goes on location has more leeway to veer off the beaten path than Google’s
on-the-payroll photographic teams fulfilling their assignments, one’s own
financial, physical, and time limitations also restrict one’s ability to capture the imagery
one might like. Moreover, on streets and roads with heavy traffic one might not
want to risk darting out into the traffic long enough to take the street shots that
the Google team has taken driving along, which can be (re)captured as
high-quality still shots. Of course, then you have all the people taking
cruising videos on many major and even minor thoroughfares riding from one
point to another and then uploading them to YouTube or Vimeo - but those videos
still can’t match Google in allowing a (re)photographer to carefully arrange framed
still shots along the route.
According to Denis Dutton, our affinity for landscape
imagery may be embedded into our genes as evolutionary adaptations. [2] Our
Pleistocene ancestors gazed upon distant verdant vistas as potential sources of
sustenance or/and habitat, sizing them up through various prior experiences as
advantageous or disadvantageous. In the long term, this connection to the
landscape became embedded into our psyches as part of humanity’s general outlook.
As a result (in Dutton’s theory), we still harbor great longing to be a part of
the landscape scenes we admire and gaze upon with affection – hence, if you
care to believe it, the popularity of landscape imagery in calendar art. For
those of us growing up in the modern urban streetscape, however, the streets
may induce the same sort of affections in a primitive sort of way, as we size
up the (sub)urban surroundings in similar terms of either danger, or the affective
results it can provide us through experiences such as shopping, entertainment,
or various services we need.
Google Street View offers the screen-shot or “virtual” photographer
similar choices to if the photographer was actually at the location with image
capturing device in tow, i.e.. digital camera, mobile device, etc. There is the
ability to alter perspective, zoom and pan, and select a portion of the image
to capture. Of course like any digital imagery, it is easy to call up any of
the available image processing apps to enhance or distort the image at will with
all sorts of effects.
Sharing images is linked to the human desire to share
experiences. We experience something that affects us in some way, and we like
others to experience that feeling, too. As the lyrics in the 70s rocker Peter
Frampton song go, “Do you feel like we do.” The human hunger for, and
entrancement with, imagery gave rise to the full-blown Age of Photography early
in the 20th century. As our grandparents and great-grandparents browsed
through photo albums or presented 35mm slide shows and 8mm home movies on a
Saturday night to family members and friends, so we upload our photos and
videos to social media for others to see and enjoy as well.
But there’s also a subversive side to (re)photographing a
scene. And it relates to the social media phenomenon of posting photos online not
only as a means of sharing experiences – certainly one of the motivating drivers
of social media – but also as “proof” of one’s being in a certain place, and
the subsequent underlying prestige that being “there” in person produces.
Traveling outside one’s usual environs has always had an
exotic appeal relating to the change in one’s usually fixed geospatial location,
even if one travels only a short distance (“short” being relative to the people
involved and their social, cultural, and historical context). Without a doubt,
however, the farther one travels from one’s “home” location, and especially to
places of noteworthy holiday excursion, the more the cachet attached to the
trip.
By (re)photographing a scene without actually physically
being there challenges and undermines this cachet of the whole notion that
travel somehow elevates one’s status in some fashion or another. Why should it
matter that I’m not “there” when I take a picture – or capture an image - of a
scene that I like in some respect or want to retain for whatever reason I have
in mind, even if on a purely curatorial basis?
Appropriation has been an integral and noted part of
postmodern artistic practice. Long before Sherri Levine’s photographs of famous
photographs, Robert Rauschenberg was incorporating bits and pieces of the
visual ephemera of modern life into his combines and photomontages. On the
Internet, the ubiquity of images and the ease of downloading and copying them
has made the repositioning of images from their original contexts into one’s
own personal usage and presentation almost effortless. Images now freely float
half in the Real World and half in Virtual Reality untethered to any fixed
reference point.
The indexical quality that photographs in the pre-digital
era were purported to possess – that a photograph points to something in the
Real World as truthful image of whatever was recorded on film – has for all
intents and purposes, vanished in the digital era. Since images can be conjured
up and altered at will, their veracity has also disappeared, and are now called
into question at every turn.
However, the greater lesson to be learned, and perhaps more
easily apprehended in virtual photography, is that photography is, and never
was, neutral or objective in its image capture. The subjective decisions made
by the photographer either beforehand or on the spot embed any image taken with
all of the personal worldview of the photographer. For example, in my series of
“Sunset Boulevard” screen captures (from Google Maps Street View along Sunset
Blvd. in Los Angeles)
I concentrate on the grittier side of the street, so to speak.
The scenes I have chosen in this series deliberately reflect
or intend to create an emotional state or even promote a political or
ideological position, whatever that may be. But on another level, I can also be
giving false image of place through my selection decisions. I illustrate this
by presenting an alternative set of images from the Sunset Blvd. series, which
show glitzier and upscale portions of the strip that I deliberately omitted
from the first set.
I can also, and do try to, inject an aesthetic consideration
into my subject matter in the way that I adjust the framing and focus and
extent of the capture through whatever tools are available to me on my screen
capture device. The intentionality, then, becomes the means by which my image
captures steer the imagery into the realm of art. [3]
Moreover, a grouping of scenes performs an additive function
in creating the statement (if there is one) that an artist wishes to make. And
groupings are in line with the mass of images that social media users blithely
upload at once from recent experiences. This not saying that the carefully
composed singular shot still can’t have great impact, just that opposed to the
analog era where film itself and film processing was relatively expensive,
multiple image shots are the norm in the digital world for even the most casual
user.
For instance, as a multimedia artist working in traditional
artmarking, digital photography, and video I have hard drives, various media types,
and cloud storage for thousands of personal and art-related images. I have
heard of others who have many, many more – who knows, perhaps as much as 100,000
or even greater in some cases. Only professional photographers, with their own
darkrooms and photographic developing equipment, would have been storing that
many images back in the analog days. Images today are ubiquitous and cheap and
instances of them proliferate like weeds across the web.
As a result, the digital world is just brimming with
potential to provide the means to spawn not only variations of traditional
imagery but totally new kinds as well. New media artists are already engaged in
this direction, imagining, experimenting and transforming the visual landscape
in ways we will hardly recognize in the decades to come.
Reference:
[1]
Understanding Google Street View:
[2] Dutton, Denis. (2009). The art instinct: Beauty, pleasure, and human evolution. New York: Bloomsbury
Press.
[3] Some aestheticians, such as Monroe Beardsley, dispute
artist’s intentionality as a factor in judging the success of a work of art.
Ibid., pp. 167 -8.
Completed August 13, 2016
©2016 Daniel John Bornt
Street View Imagery:
