Where’s Waldo?
Photography’s long-sought after decisive moment is happening more and more online, as meta-photographers aim their sensitivities at vast databases of machine-collected imagery from Google and other sources. In The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, a review of Jon Rafman’s recent exhibition at London’s Saatchi Gallery, Marco Bohr equates the recognition of significant images in the sea of automatically-collected Google street view data with Cartier-Bresson’s street-photography mantra. Apparently it’s happening all over: other artists who appropriate Google Street View images, such as Mishka Henner in the UK, Michael Wolf in Germany or Doug Rickard in the US are blurring photography’s once well-defended boundaries of authorship.
