The other night, I was at the bar with my friend
Stephen and
Dan, and the subject of the new google streetview software came up. That's the database connected to google maps where-in real panoramic photographs of some selected locations are available for various map locations. From reading on the internet, it looks like this data was produced by exhaustively photographing some pre-determined streets with a 360 degree bank of cameras mounted on top of various cars, essentially documenting entire cities, albeit currently only from a single point of view.
Now, issues of privacy and how massive computer aided documentation affects the public vs. interior lives of regular people aside, a big thing that we talked about was the idea that, contained within this mindless, exhaustive dataset, would be great pictures, street and landscape photography as "good" as anything produced by any of my favorite photographers, Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand, Stephen Shore, whoever, really. Indeed, there should be, hidden in the admittedly huge amounts of noise, whole bodies of work, ripe for editing, cropping, curating and re-interpreting. After all, a photographer currently uses time and light to cull from the infinite world of light around her to create images on paper, so if a machine or corporation has created a version of this infinite space (although admittedly a much smaller subset of infinity than even the possibilities of even the small world available to anyone), is this different than photography as we think of it, or merely another tool.
So, with this in mind, and in conjunction with my already existing love for photographs from cars, I went in and started looking through the maps of some of the cities google has already crawled, looking for images I'd edit from the noise of the google maps database. Beginning this quick experiment, there were a few interesting surprises.
- Because of the way the images are digitally composited, lens flares become these amazing stalks of light that seem to interact with the corporeal world.
- Similarly, there are times when one of the cameras will color shift from the others, and because of the compositing again, occasionally a ghostly magenta wall will appear in the middle of the landscape.
- The cameras do also create a blurring affect similar to my drive-by images, but with motion blur in multiple strange directions.
Essentially, some of the most interesting parts of these images are where fidelity to what a real world image might look like fall apart, in the artifacts of the compositing algorithm, in where the mindless perfection of the machine returns unexpected results.
For better or for worse, all of this starts to approach a world where all images of the real world can be expressed by providing google with latitude, longitude, orientation, angle from the horizon and magnification. Which reminds me of an old joke, which I will paraphrase horribly because I can't really remember the set-up:
A guy dies and goes to Purgatory, which is a waiting room that no one ever seems to leave. All of a sudden, from across the room, someone shouts "27!" and the whole room bursts into laughter. A few minutes later, someone else shouts "66!" and once again, everyone cracks up. Puzzled, he asks his neighbor what's going on.
"Well, we've all been here in purgatory for so long, we've told all the jokes there are to tell. So we went ahead an gave them all numbers, so we can save time and just shout out the number of the joke we want to tell," says his neighbor.
The man is puzzled by all of this, but, since he's new in Purgatory and wants to make friends, he decides to make a go of it. "99!" he shouts out. The room is totally silent and people look sort of puzzled. Embarassed, he wonders what's going on. Not more than a minute later, someone else shouts "99!" once again to peals of laughter. Once again, he turns to his neighbor, "Hey, how come no one laughed when I told that joke?"
"Well, it's not so much the joke, it's how he tells it!"
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