This assignment was not nearly as simple as I thought it would be. Having the scope of all that Google street view has collected thus far is hardly a free ticket to extraordinary images. I spent days doing what Jon Rafman does on the regular and became quickly discouraged.
This manner of literally projecting oneself into a photographer’s viewfinder was awkward and frustrating for me. Walter Benjamin said that photography “freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens”, (The Work of Art in the Ages, Preface, paragraph 4) and while Google offers a “360” view, it is a constrained one at best. A person can easily discern his or her own exploring and tactile mode from that of a multi-view camera mounted onto a vehicle heading in one direction. However, I do not believe that this truly eases any “artistic function”. Keeping up with the eye is no measure of artistic capability. Artists will always struggle with how the mind, eye, and hand work to resolve its objective, regardless of the medium.
I found my image on the Copacabana beaches of Rio de Janeiro. I selected the shot for its compositional elements as well as those related to this idea of a “decisive moment” even through a venue such as Google street view. It was difficult to find but very easy to spot. While Benjamin states that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (The Work of Art in the Ages, Preface, paragraph 5), I feel that a photograph is the visual recording of a space in time and that my reproduction or find from the numberless terrains mapped by Google, displays this concept most candidly.
The patterns and neutral grays are aesthetically pleasing in of themselves. The sporadic splashes of orange are visually engaging, but the central subjects are what truly encapsulates the ethereal aspect of the image. If you toggle forward or backward from them, they disappear. They are but a slice of the landscape easily missed yet bold in their presence and they look as though they have been waiting all day for the Google street view car to pass by and take their picture.