“Exhaustive Images” and Jon Rafman’s “The Nine Eyes of Google Street View”

A longish essay that I wrote for Fillip for their new series on photography and biopolitics is now online through their website. Commissioned by Kate Steinmann, associate editor at Fillip and the series’ editor, the text tries to borrow ideas from Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography and some key writings on biopolitics and apply them to the everyday arena of the photographic images produced and circulated by Google Maps Street View. While I sometimes speak more broadly about Street View as a technology of seeing and an interactive framework for surveilling others, my main focus is on Canadian artist Jon Rafman‘s ongoing series The Nine Eyes of Google Street View (2008–), which extracts stills from Street View and presents them through his online venue, or as large-scale photographs in the gallery.

What I like about Rafman’s project is the way it troubles the simplistic model of the photographer-subject relationship that is often used to measure the ethical implications of social documentary photography. Instead, his compilation of Street View images stresses the ambiguous, uncertain ethical relationship between image, subject and spectator that has become the status quo in a time of authorless (as the Google Street View images seen), globally circulated digital images. It’s a new kind of relationship between spectators and subjects that I try and outline, especially towards the end of the essay, through Lauren Berlant’s notion of “slow death” (this links to a PDF of her article): the exhaustion that accompanies the maintenance of life under capitalism.

Even though the text is “finished,” I still feel it’s a work-in-progress. I haven’t entirely resolved where all these ideas might lead, or what exactly the Street View images, and Rafman’s use of them, is asking from us as viewers. I also didn’t intend for the title of the text, “Exhaustive Images,” to seem like quite such a double-entendre, but if you do make it through the (very long) article, I would love to talk more about it and how we might more adequately address all this exhaustion.