Jon Rafman is one of a new breed of street photographers sourcing images from Google Street View to create fascinating series of work. Rafman has suggested that it might be the ultimate conclusion of the medium: “it’s almost as if the camera is this modern God that sees everything, but doesn’t make any moral judgements.”
“These are photographs that no one took and memories that no one has,” says Rafman. “By reintroducing the human gaze, I reassert the uniqueness of the individual.”
Working in the tradition of the great American documentarists Robert Frank and Walker Evans, Doug Rickard explores the forgotten hinterlands of urban America. He says finding Google Street View was a kind of epiphany: “I felt the same sort of freedom as I would walking around the street.”
Rickard says his work turns Google Street View into a “public poetry” and explores places in the US where “the American dream was shattered or impossible to achieve.”
Very interesting concept.