Is it artists and photographers who are the creators of portraits, or those who they portray?

How far is my painting or photographing someone whose clothes and appearance I find ‘attractive’ or ‘interesting’ appropriating their creativity in their own identity – aside from the privacy issues?

examples

• The long history of young women ‘muses’ of male painters? 
• Street photography of people like Bruce Gilden?

Using Google Street View can be a perfectly valid way of generating images that opens up possibilities that are different from those where the photographer is the one behind the lens. Characteristics are changing – people hearing of the Google Street Car visit in advance are now staging images and most tourist destinations at least are in high resolution.

“I think that I chose pictures that partially represented those biases and media-affected notions of place, and yet I explored immensely these American places, a thousand hours or more, gaining an understanding of the conditions.”

Doug Rickard in ‘A New American Picture’ !! find full ref

“anyone who thinks that trawling through millions of street view images in the search of a few ‘decisive moments’ is easy or ‘not art’ has never tried to do it! It requires a lot of research to decide where one might look. There are then the same possibilities for cropping and image manipulation as in photos taken from behind the lens.”

ALEXANDER, Jesse OCA Landscape Photography – update citation with ref to his book

Geoff Dyer’s article on photographers using Google Street View:

is this article still available?

I personally find experiencing things myself directly with my camera a more fulfilling and enjoyable way of working than sitting for hours in front of my computer. Partly because of RSI.

Nevertheless Google Street View, and also the landscape view on Google Maps can be extremely interesting as a way of researching locations either before or after taking one’s own photographs.

I did this extensively in researching Shingle Street where Google Maps show a ‘drone’ view of tapestry field segments.

The numbers of locations now covered is increasing all the time. Earlier many of the places I was going for work and wanted to photograph eg in Africa and Kyrgyzstan were not covered except for a few central tourist areas of capital cities like Nairobi.

Recently for a Life Writing assignment I used Google Street View to see how far Indian villages in West Bengal and areas of Calcutta where I had work in the 1980s and 1990s had changed. Admittedly the villages around the University town in Santiniketan are now dotted with tourist hotels anxious for publicity. Nevertheless I found it quite remarkable how much information is now there, and how useful it can be.

However I did not use the Shingle Street maps because I have not so far had sufficient clarification on Copyright, despite contacting Google. It seems that copyright rests with the original photographer, but I had no success trying to contact them either.

examples

Michael Wolf is primarily interested in the aesthetics of the images. The fact that they are taken randomly means that ‘decisive moments’ are often rather ambiguous is a way that is quite difficult to reproduce unless the photographer uses the camera’s automatic timer. They leave interpretation of the action and meaning to the viewer. Many Google images in the early days were characterised by pixelation and image noise also creates a  certain aesthetic that some have likened to the pixelation techniques of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Though I find Google pixelation more evocative because of its blurring of ‘reality’ and the blurred out faces.

Jon Rafman takes this tension between the random nature of the image and subsequent imposition of meaning in the selection and viewing processes even further. His work explores the relationship between the “real” and the “virtual” in contemporary life, urging viewers to reconsider the boundaries between the two. In 9-Eyes – he finds in Google Street View images a spontaneity and authenticity he finds is lost from current street photography. He just takes straight screen shots of the images. He sees the fact that they are captured by a roving robot by chance as a more poetic ‘modernist’ notion of god – God does not care about reality, just observes. Watching but does not take a moral stance. The human gaze then interpretes, finds meaning, beauty and stories. I find many of his images extremely evocative in the power that tension creates – removing many of the compositional conventions and choices from the photographer somehow gives the actual actions captured by the camera even more poignancy.

Doug Rickard in ‘A New American Picture’ he presents deeply affecting evidence of the American Dream inverted – a startling photographic portrait of the socially disenfranchised. In his particular case, he has additional constraints of personal circumstances that tied him to home. He actively seeks out areas of America where the Street View car goes but are in many ways a no go area for other outsider photographers. He looks for stories and ‘decisive moments’ -compositions where ‘things line up’ – linking with ideas and styles from American photographic traditions like early documentary and colour of Shore and Egglestone. He rephotographs the machine-made images as they appear on his computer screen, framing and freeing them from their technological origins.  He then experiments with geometry and distortions. He manipulates the feeling of ‘drive-by’ and often high angle photography to heighten sense of isolation – people cordoned off in terms of lacking a voice, from power – even over whether or not they are photographed. It is also significant that high resolution images are not available for these areas – only for richer areas and tourist locations.

Mishka Henner No Man’s Land