Despite not getting to as many shows this summer as I would have liked (not helped by the fact that so many galleries are closed this time of year – I just discovered that during my two week trip to Vancouver, only one gallery is open!), I have been better at looking into what’s going on across the country/continent. And one of my weekly internet art stops has been at Art Fag City for their annual IMG MGMT series of image-based artist essays. Not only are they fun to scan through, but some of them are super clever.

Google Street View, Rue de la Huchette, Paris, France, from artfagcity.com

In particular, I highly recommend this week’s “The Nine Eyes of Google Street View” by Montreal-based Jon Rafman. His survey of images captured by the sorta creepy technology is fascinating, and his commentary, phrased largely in the form of open-ended questions, does a better job of probing the theoretical and ethical questions that Google Street View prompts than any academic article or conference paper I’ve encountered recently. Rafman’s text deftly weaves together the aesthetic pleasure we derive from “spying” on people through the program; the accidentally aesthetic, nearly high-art, images that often result from the robotic camera’s documentation (like the distinctly Robert Doisneau-inspired image from France, above); the way boundaries between anonymity and recognition are negotiated through the program (especially the way in which faces are often blurred to “protect” subjects’ identities); and the ethical implications of having a wandering, 9-lensed camera documenting the streets.

Google Street View, Via Valassa, Rho, Lombardy, Italy, from artfagcity.com

As Rafman points out, while it might seem that we all run the same risk of being photographed in public, those who live and work in the streets (often people who are poor or marginalized) are most often the ones who are captured by the roving camera. And when viewers encounter these images, we are faced with a kind of moral/ethical dilemma since the program offers us no moral compass or ethical guidelines in the way the images have been taken and circulated (identity, after all, is not just communicated through faces, but through other markers of social and economic standing). The problem, as Rafman puts it, is that “Even though Google places a comment, ‘report a concern’ on the bottom of every single image, how can I demonstrate my concern for humanity within Google’s street photography?”

Google Street View, 51 E. Claremont St. Edinburgh, Scotland, from artfagcity.com

Other, less nefarious images, are compelling for their lack of human figures and for the way they construct specific places in an otherwise geographically unmoored web space. Again, quoting Rafman, 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.

Super smart, concise, and beautiful. Definitely worth the five minutes it takes to read, if you have them.