Required Reading

IMG MGMT: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View by Jon Rafman

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Art Fag City's IMG MGMT series is on a roll! This week they posted "The Nine Eyes of Google Street View" by Jon Rafman, a meditative photo essay on Google Street View, culled from the artist's personal collection of screen captures. See below for a teaser, full essay here.

One year ago, I started collecting screen captures of Google Street Views from a range of Street View blogs and through my own hunting. This essay illustrates how my Street View collections reflect the excitement of exploring this new, virtual world. The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project. At the same time, I acknowledge that this way of photographing creates a cultural text like any other, a structured and structuring space whose codes and meaning the artist and the curator of the images can assist in constructing or deciphering.