Feet on the ground from far away

This lit­tle post­let on a tum­blr that hails from Minnesota—

—made me stop and go: A-ha! We all do this now, don’t we?

When I was look­ing for a new apart­ment a year and a half ago, there were a cou­ple of days where I spent more time in Google Street View than in, uh, the real street. When I was scout­ing hotels in Paris last spring, I’d posi­tion my lit­tle yel­low avatar at the front door of, say, the Hotel la Demeure and then take a test stroll. Did the Paris that stretched out there seem fun—or foreboding?

And of course it goes beyond Street View. We’re all satel­lite ana­lysts now; look­ing for an apart­ment, I quickly learned the over­head sig­na­ture of my favorite kind of street. It’s a cer­tain width, with a cer­tain den­sity of dark-green tree splotches and a cer­tain num­ber of mis­sile silos.

But this is all very pedestra­t­ian; very prac­ti­cal. You can also think about Google Street View as a new kind of street pho­tog­ra­phy. Jon Raf­man scouts Street View for com­pelling images—and, wow, he finds them. He writes:

Ini­tially, I was attracted to the noisy ama­teur aes­thetic of the raw images. Street Views evoked an urgency I felt was present in ear­lier street pho­tog­ra­phy. With its sup­pos­edly neu­tral gaze, the Street View pho­tog­ra­phy had a spon­ta­neous qual­ity unspoiled by the sen­si­tiv­i­ties or agen­das of a human pho­tog­ra­pher. It was tempt­ing to see the images as a neu­tral and priv­i­leged rep­re­sen­ta­tion of reality—as though the Street Views, wrenched from any social con­text other than geospa­tial con­ti­gu­ity, were able to per­form true docu-photography, cap­tur­ing frag­ments of real­ity stripped of all cul­tural intentions.

!!!

Do check out his images if you haven’t seen them already; they’re really stun­ning. And equally stun­ning, for me, is the image of Raf­man at a com­puter, click­ing through Google Street View—scouting, searching—a step at a time.

3 Responses

echan says:
January 7, 2010 at 12:20 am
Oh, man, I can’t wait until I am 85 and there’s Google archived street view by decade. Can you imag­ine what it would be like in 2063 to set Google Maps on 2010, and take a stroll down mem­ory lane? A total, imer­sive Lost Land­scapes experience.
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Britta G says:
January 11, 2010 at 3:01 am
also: http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2009/03/streetview-and-collective-remembering.html
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Monday tab dump « Snarkmarket says:
January 11, 2010 at 6:26 pm
[…] Street View update (pre­vi­ously): Hmm, per­haps they’ll sell vir­tual bill­boards com­pos­ited into Street […]
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