Out now: New Documents’ book, Jon Rafman, “Nine Eyes”

I could not be more pleased to be included in this just-released monograph on the work of the brilliant, Sobey-nominated Jon Rafman, edited by Kate Steinmann and brought to you by New Documents (some of the same folks behind Fillip). My 2011 essay, “Exhaustive images: Surveillance, Sovereignty and Subjectivity in Google Maps Street View” appears there, in a significantly shortened and updated form (it’s amazing how much changes with an online technology in the course of four years).

In The Nine Eyes of Google Street View(2008–), Jon Rafman employs a new approach to the strategy of artistic appropriation, extracting screenshots from Google Street View’s vast online archive to create singular photographs that range from the lyrical to the abject. Selected from the larger collection of images that comprise his ever-expanding project, the images in this volume illuminate in multiple dimensions our mutually constitutive relationship with images and testify to the importance of Nine Eyes in an increasingly codified, image-saturated world.

 

Rafman’s photographs appear alongside essays on the work by editor Kate Steinmann, Joanne McNeil, Sohrab Mohebbi, and Gabrielle Moser, as well as a text by the artist himself, written in collaboration with Sandra Rafman.

 

Edited by Kate Steinmann. Designed by The Future.