Google Street View Photography

My friend Sam linked to a really interesting project that Jon Rafman has done to collection Google Street View images as a work of artful photography.

Google Street View obviously isn’t photography; it’s just a fleet of vans capturing a photo of every roadway in the world (no big deal). However, when you take this spaghetti-against-the-wall approach and combine it with the kind of careful curation Jon Rafman has performed, I think you produce a kind of art.

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This is crazy - the Google Street View van just happened to catch a field fire in progress. If someone hadn’t have gone looking for this, no one would have captured this really interesting moment in time.

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Through some fluke in Google’s image stitching algorithm, we’ve got something like a person would have actually made in Photoshop. This photo emerged through an automated, mechanical process, but represents something more when we imbue it with meaning.


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