Google Street View’s Street Photography

“A street view image can give us a sense of what it feels like to have everything recorded, but no particular significance accorded to anything.”

In a guest post over at Art Fag City, Jon Rafman presents an excellent image essay on Google’s Street View feature and the many amazingly curious images its roving cars have caught since its inception two years ago.

Collected from blogs and his own Google Maps usage, Rafman pulls some of the most compelling images from Street View and attempts to articulate both the importance in studying this growing mass of images captured by computer-controlled cameras and the implications of us, as human beings, continuing to place meaning onto their subject matter, their composition, and their moral implications.

I was certainly taken by a number of the images, and undoubtedly by the writer’s design, I began to wonder what it means to see these very selected images pulled from their contextual frame of more streets, more people, and less interesting combinations thereof.

Consider this a must-read.

[via Art Fag City]