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Street photography versus Street View
Filed in Art - November 8, 2009There has been an outbreak of people asking (example) whether the advent of Google’s Street View imagery means the death of conventional photography. Why bother? people ask. There are Street View books, magazine articles, favorite image selections in blog posts and on and on and on. Won’t Google document the world? Can’t everybody else stop now?
Even allowing for some obvious questions about image quality (resolution etc), and the fact the Street View cameras won’t get everywhere, I think to ask the question is to misunderstand what documentary photographers have done in the past.
I’m not knocking Google’s efforts here at all. I love Street View. I’ve sent people google-links to the place I happen to be standing so that they can see something similar to what I can see. It is fun. It is educational. And it is undoubtedly documentary.
But it isn’t edited.
I know people edit it after the fact – that’s where the book comes from, after all. Although quite how long the intense interest in Google’s imagery will go on once we have all got used to the fact it exists remains to be seen. But after the fact editing is different, I would suggest, from editing live. And editing live is what a still photographer does. Where you stand and when you press the button are conscious decisions. Big, important, conscious decisions.
It is possible to over argue that Google’s pictures are neutral. Selection does go on at some level. But on a neutralness scale, the Street View pictures rate as “pretty neutral”. Whereas nobody would argue the same of Don McCullin, Sebastião Salgado or Henri Cartier Bresson.
I might characterise Google’s approach as record everything, whereas a still photographer has both an opportunity and a need to try to sum up in a single frame.
There is room for both, but let’s not confuse the two things.
Just as Google has moved the map from the 2nd to the third dimension, so photography works in the fourth. There is no sense of time with Google, street photography in various forms gives us just that.
November 8, 2009 @ 8:44 pm
I would say that street photographers have little to worry about. I rather like what Google has done. It makes it every interesting to zoom down to that level and take in the landmarks, especially if you are trying to find something or perhaps just want to know what things look like in that area.
Street photography, I believe, is a bit different, with the photographer, as you said, having to sum up things in a single frame. Googles 360 degree cameras are simply collecting data, not trying to tell a story.
November 8, 2009 @ 8:54 pm
Google is close to being an infinite number of monkeys, but that’s fine. Apart from the fact that sorting through the data is likely to be mindnumbingly dull, there is a real difference between sorting after the fact and choosing a moment to sum up a whole story or idea.
Mike
November 8, 2009 @ 11:35 pm
It’s not necessary to sum anything up. All that’s needed for a picture is something worth showing.
November 9, 2009 @ 4:48 am
Oren, True enough
Mike
November 9, 2009 @ 3:41 pm
Since you seem to have turned off comments on your final post, I’ll post here.
Seems all my regular bloggers are disappearing, first Matt 1pt4, now you. What next, TOP?!!
As a longer time lurker and occasional poster on your blog, I’d just like to say thanks for all your posts on this blog. I stop by every couple of weeks usually and always find some insightful thought or link on here. So thanks!
All the best,
Sam.
December 4, 2009 @ 5:07 am