Owen G. Clow
Google Street View Photography and the Visual Culture of American Poverty
Note on copyright: This essay in its original form contained numerous in-text images. Out of an abundance of concern, these have been deleted and replaced with offsite links to the same images.
In May of 2007, a press release on the official Google Maps blog heralded “a new feature that will further enhance your ability to understand the world through images—Google Street View.”[1] Initially limited to the downtown areas of a few American cities, Google Street View (GSV) was the product of a complex system of car-mounted cameras and algorithmic image manipulation. At the heart of the project was a panoramic camera affixed to the roof of a car. This car would drive around each city, take pictures at regular intervals, composite them together into a fully contiguous panorama, and then load each interval into Google Maps, mapping the spatial coordinates given by the position of the vehicle on the street onto the corresponding Cartesian space of Google Maps.[2] In the intervening thirteen years, GSV has blossomed, both in geographical scope and technological sophistication.[3] As Street View vehicles continue towards their ultimate goal—traveling and documenting every road on Earth—GSV has produced a unique culture of public digital spectatorship. It has also, more broadly, patterned how we see and understand the world around us.
Like many Google projects, GSV originated from an unspecific and broadly utopian impulse to make the world more accessible. There are legitimate reasons to celebrate its existence. GSV is a corporate product, but it is offered completely free of charge to all who access the website (or who download the free Google Earth software, which has GSV content embedded). There is the potential in GSV for genuine cross-cultural understanding: rather than traditional travel, which can be expensive and physically onerous, GSV offers those curious about the life and landscapes of distant places a first-person perspective on just that. Moreover, GSV can serve as a valuable pedagogical tool: over the years, Google has partnered with museums and other cultural sites to provide a “Street View” of their spaces and displays, enabling virtual access to students and patrons who are unable to visit in person.[4] And, of course, GSV offers the entertainment value of pure escapism: it isn’t just that it’s interesting to virtually navigate a mountain pass in Kyrgyzstan, it’s that it’s fun.
Grigorievka Gorge in Kyrgyzstan. Imagery from Google, cropped and reproduced by the author.
GSV has also been highly controversial. It is, after all, a corporate surveillance project which renders the public landscape—not just trees and buildings but cars, people, animals, et cetera—permanently visible and permanently accessible. GSV photography is by definition nonconsensual. Within a year of GSV’s initial release, Google responded to complaints along these lines by adding an algorithm which procedurally blurred human faces, license plates, and other specifically identifiable elements of these images.[5] Even with this addition, however, privacy concerns underwrite much of the public discourse surrounding GSV, and Google has spent substantial resources trying to reconcile its practice with laws surrounding personal privacy in a number of states. Germany, notably, remains largely unmapped by GSV due to legal obstacles.[6] Sociological research has implicated GSV in perpetuating classist attitudes towards working class communities.[7] And, among some critics, there remains a distinct feeling of unease at the notion that this technological project to create a visual record of the entire world is owned and controlled by an incomprehensibly powerful corporation worth over one trillion dollars.[8]
The inherent tension between GSV’s utopian concept—enabling “people everywhere to virtually explore the world”—and the sophisticated apparatus of total public surveillance which drives the project has provided fertile soil for artistic exploration.[9] One of the earliest visual projects involving GSV material, Jon Rafman’s ongoing 9 Eyes series attempts to capture the disorienting experience of total technological surveillance by curating GSV images that evoke tension, unease, and melancholia–offering, in Rafman’s words, “a sense of what it feels like to have everything recorded, but no particular significance accorded to anything.”[10] Michael Wolf’s Fuck You, one of several of the artist’s related projects, criticizes GSV’s technique of surveillance by cataloging various instances of blur-faced humans on GSV holding up middle fingers to the passing camera.[11] Tim Tetzner’s If The Eyes Can’t Touch (Blurred Modernism) highlights the visually jarring GSV dataset for Berlin, featuring rows of buildings with certain addresses blurred beyond recognition–the product of Google’s aforementioned capitulation to German privacy laws.[12] Of course, not all GSV art is an implicit critique of corporate capitalism or unstoppable surveillance. Jacqui Kenny’sThe Agoraphobic Traveller uses GSV to create a comparatively traditional landscape/cityscape photo-series, its component images curated specifically to produce an attractive and glamorous photographic aesthetic.[13] Kenny’s work is also noteworthy for its explicit approval from Google, which recently authorized the sale of a number of her prints for charity.[14] Implicit in all of these projects is the notion that GSV reveals something about both the land and the human relations that take place upon it. But what happens when the revelatory, documentary power of GSV is directed towards questions of wealth and poverty?
Untitled, 9 Eyes, Jon Rafman, 2020.
“Synchronized Camels, UAE,” The Agoraphobic Traveller, Jacqui Kenny, 2017.
This essay examines three projects which use GSV photography to explore and question American poverty: Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture, Justin Blinder’s Vacated, and Alex Alsup’s GooBing Detroit. The technology of GSV informs both the aesthetics and the message of these projects: the panoramic visual field of the Street View camera reveals the world in a way that closely resembles reality, just as it conceals the ideology of benevolent corporate surveillance that enables this kind of seeing. Furthermore, the processing of each image to remove faces, text, or copyrighted content often yields a disorienting mixture of supposed verisimilitude and obvious visual manipulation. While animated by an activist motivation generally similar to that of social documentary photography—the belief that visually documenting and publicizing social ills fosters empathy and encourages the amelioration of those ills—the art of Rickard, Blinder, and Alsup deviates from the genre’s traditional tendency toward human portraiture. Where traditional forms of social documentary photography portrayed poverty inscribed on the human body, “Street View” photography portrays poverty in the landscape, in architectural shifts, in dilapidated houses and overgrown yards, rather than in the furrowed brows and dirty feet of indigent families. In this sense, the message is limited by the medium: GSV is a tool that catalogs and documents “real” property–land and buildings which people own, build, exchange, and destroy–and, consequently, GSV enables one to see clearly the street address of a house, to see its features and its architecture, all the while obscuring the people on the sidewalk, the stoop, the porch, all of whom become literally faceless. Rickard, Blinder, and Alsup make a useful intervention, but GSV technology nevertheless constrains their work within a visual vocabulary of American poverty that centers property in lieu of people.
Social documentary photography: poverty in image and imagination
Situating these GSV projects within the artistic tradition of social documentary photography provides important context for understanding their messaging and impact. It is admittedly an unusual designation, given that neither Rickard, Blinder, nor Alsup actually photographed their subjects, or even held (for these purposes) a camera. More accurately, these artists assembled procedurally-generated photographs and arranged them into a serial structure, adding captioning and contextual information where necessary, thereby making them viable for public presentation. Their works each resemble a photo-series, and in most senses function as one. The artists under consideration are not photographers per se, but they share an activist motivation and aesthetic orientation with a long tradition of similarly-intentioned social documentary photography.
Social documentary photography is, as the name implies, a tradition of photography that is both documentary, in the sense that it aims to document the visible conditions of reality, and social, in the sense that this documentation explicitly engages with social problems. In America, historians often use the turn-of-the-century reformer Jacob Riis’s widely-reproduced How The Other Half Lives, a photographic expedition into the tenements, boarding houses, and working-class environs of New York City to clarify the origins of social documentary photography.
Taken during the 1880s, Riis’s photographs reflect an embryonic stage of development, both for social documentary and for photography more generally. In his so-called “magic lantern shows” for middle-class audiences, Riis supplemented his visual content with extensive text and oratory, later claiming in an autobiography that he was “no good at all as a photographer.”[15] The formal content of the images is likely familiar, but one visual theme bears deeper analysis: an emphasis on human bodies—wiry musculature and crevassed facial lines—as a site for “reading” the human condition of poverty.[16] For Riis, the importance of his photography was not simply that the living environment of poor workers was dangerous and unhygienic, it was that his audience would work towards the alleviation of these conditions. It is worth remembering as well that Riis, though seemingly sincere in his concern for the suffering of New York City’s working class, was allowed access to these spaces primarily through a close relationship with law enforcement (he had worked as a police reporter for a decade prior), and his interest in photographic documentation dovetailed neatly with the rapidly developing practice of police surveillance.[17] Riis’s aim was to turn the slums into a visual spectacle for a philanthropic middle class, and the moral degradation of urban poverty was, in his work, seen most clearly on the bodies of the poor.
“In Poverty Gap, West Twenty-Eighth St. An English Coal-Heaver’s Home,” Jacob Riis, How The Other Half Lives, circa 1890.
By the 1930s, as the Great Depression made it increasingly difficult to ignore widespread suffering among the American working class, the federal government had begun to take a serious interest in social documentary photography. The most productive result of this attention was a public photography project conceived under the auspices of the Resettlement Administration (which quickly became the Farm Security Administration), managed by the economist and amateur photographer Roy Stryker. Stryker, a true believer in the potential of social documentary photography to create public support for New Deal social welfare programs, contracted a number of professional photographers and sent them on journalistic “assignments,” where they were given a paycheck and some freedom in selecting their subjects.[18] Like Riis, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers demonstrated a broad preference for human subjects, although Ben Shahn and Arthur Rothstein, among others, produced a number of compelling photographs of ramshackle living quarters and degraded structural foundations. Some of the most enduring images of the Great Depression were products of the FSA program: Dorothea Lange’s portrait of farmworker Florence O. Thompson—a photograph often referred to as “Migrant Mother”—is perhaps its most memorable product. In the photograph, Thompson’s gaze is set on something distant, far past the camera; the lacework of wrinkles along her forehead and around her eyes suggests that her lifestyle has aged her beyond her years; her children (we presume) hide their faces entirely. The documentary value of the photograph was not in its ability to capture something specific about the conditions of poverty; indeed, research has shown that Lange’s minimal description of Thompson’s work and circumstances was somewhat inaccurate.[19] Rather, the value of the image was in its ability to foster empathy for the subject, to force the audience to connect a visible human face to the experience of destitution, and to transform this subjective empathy into support for the social welfare efforts of the federal government. Stryker himself called Lange’s portrait of Thompson “the picture,” and regarded it as the most successful photograph of the entire project.[20] Thompson, for her part, told a reporter in 1978, “I wish she hadn’t taken my picture.”[21]
Compare: “Destitute pea pickers in California,” Dorothea Lange, 1936 (the “Migrant Mother” photograph); “Migrant agricultural worker’s family,” Dorothea Lange, 1936, same subjects.
Social documentary photographers concerned with poverty have come to acknowledge a fundamental tension in their own project: if the ethos of the form demands that the audience see poverty as a problem of individual human suffering, then how does the photographer capture poverty, as manifested on the human subject, without rendering that subject pathetic or pitiable? Riis, and to some extent the FSA photographers, viewed the people they photographed as cautionary objects for a middle-class audience. The purpose of documenting their plight was to inspire a sensibility that poverty robs the poor of their dignity.
But, to their credit, later practitioners in the field have taken other paths. Milton Rogovin’s work, in particular his Lower West Side series,represents an important intervention in the form.[22] In 1972, Rogovin, a left-leaning optometrist who picked up photography after being effectively blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities fifteen years prior, began photographing residents of Buffalo, New York’s Lower West Side, which at the time had the highest rate of unemployment in the city.[23] Over a twenty-year period, Rogovin returned to photograph the same places, the same families. While no less given to portraiture than his predecessors, at the core of Rogovin’s work is a sense of dignity and autonomy in his subjects, and an understanding that social documentary photography could serve the interests of the poor without pitying or pathologizing them. While contemporary artists often recognize the “pitiable poor” as an avoidable trope, the degree to which activist photographers negotiate this problem successfully is often uneven, as common debates about “ruin porn” attest, and the role of the human subject in social documentary photography of the poor remains fraught.[24]
Compare: Untitled FSA photograph, Theodor Jung, 1936; Untitled, from Lower West Side series, Milton Rogovin, 1972.
“Street View” as a formal intervention
How, then, can GSV technology intervene on this fundamental representational problem in social documentary photography? Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture shows one potential avenue. Along with Jon Rafman, Rickard was one of the forerunners of GSV art, and A New American Picture represents one of the earliest attempts to illuminate the problem of poverty, in particular, through the use of GSV and the artistic arrangement of its content. According to Rickard, the “project started with a focus on African American communities to see what they looked like on the heels of our history,” but he soon expanded his project away from “African American communities” and into “broken areas as a whole.”[25]
The social documentary impulse in Rickard’s art is only broadly directed at an activist purpose; rather than subjective empathy, the images as a whole tend to inspire a melancholy distance from the subject. This is not to say that the images themselves are uninteresting, however. In one particularly haunting shot, “Okeechobee, FL,” the blurred face of a child stares directly into the camera, the backdrop a grid of off-white prefabricated houses. In “Atlanta, GA,” a similarly-inscrutable child bikes past a pair of boarded-up houses, the oversaturated blue of the sky muting the already-dull hues of the built landscape. The low-resolution quality of these photographs, itself an artifact from GSV’s earliest technology, amplifies the not-quite-real sensation Rickard intentionally evokes.
The presence of people in these images serves less to facilitate an emotive connection to the audience and more to suggest their complete alienation. But we see poverty not in the human subject as much as we read it in the mise-en-scène: the prefabricated houses, the upturned bicycles, even the featureless pit of sand underneath the child’s feet. In A New American Picture, poverty lives in the inanimate landscape; the spectral figures that haunt it are human, we know, but their featurelessness prevents identification and, by extension, empathy.
Atlanta, GA, A New American Picture, Doug Rickard, 2012.
Okeechobee, FL, A New American Picture, Doug Rickard, 2012.
While Rickard’s work is largely concerned with “finding” otherwise art-gallery quality photographs through GSV, Justin Blinder’s Vacated offers a more conceptually sophisticated approach to the representational problem of American poverty. Vacated draws from GSV imagery from New York City, and, in Blinder’s words, “reflect[s] the complexities of social impact and urban change in gentrifying neighborhoods.”[26] Blinder uses an array of manipulation techniques—cross-fades as well as .gif animations—to juxtapose different GSV iterations of the same scene, demonstrating change over time in a single image.[27]
Initially commissioned by the arts organization More Art to show “how New York City had changed under the twelve-year Bloomberg Administration,” Blinder found his sites through searching a New York City Department of Planning database for vacant properties and reverse-engineered the historical image data from GSV.[28] Google had not initially let its audience view older imagery of any given place; within a year of the project’s release, however, Google added a “Time Machine” feature that allows the user to easily view the material that Blinder had needed to extract from GSV manually.[29] The social commentary in Blinder’s project comes through quite clearly: gentrification modifies the urban landscape in ways that necessarily destroy the built environment and, by extension, the visual structure of community. Each image captures a transformation, but in each case it evokes a sense of destruction rather than rejuvenation.
But Vacated’s intentional focus on buildings and structures underscores a fundamental and largely inescapable aspect of art through GSV: the medium itself is a tool for the documentation of land—and land, mediated by capital, is property. The element in Blinder’s images that changes is not the visible human relationships to their environment, it is simply the environment itself. We see in one image the grotesque form of a half-built glass-plated obelisk rising over a street, but the relationship being visibly reconfigured is one of property rather than of people. Or, perhaps, we know that urban development initiatives and real estate contractors are groups of people–but instead of seeing them, we see the visible effects of their negotiations. Vacated highlights the visual and spatial transformations of gentrification, but it cannot connect these transformations to the social lives of those affected through the image alone. The architectural historian Marta Gutman, who contributed an essay for Vacated’s exhibition at the MOMA in 2013, felt similarly: in contrast to the immense human suffering of being evicted or otherwise forced from one’s home, “the cache of photographs, captured by Google Street View, can only hint at the loss.” “Do I fault Blinder for being incomplete?” she continued. “He is recording violence, even if he won’t admit it, and his record is useful. It’s up to all of us to act.”[30]
Untitled, Vacated, Justin Blinder, 2013.
Untitled, Vacated, Justin Blinder, 2013.
Like Vacated, Alex Alsup’s ongoing GooBing Detroit project attempts to show the process of urban decay through time-lapse techniques. By taking the same shot of the same scene years apart, GooBing Detroit highlights the gradual decay of built spaces in Detroit. Alsup’s hook is clever, drawing on the fact that GSV imagery for Detroit largely began in 2008, in the early months of the Great Recession, and continues into the present. Some of Alsup’s images are visually arresting, and his use of in-frame captioning adds an element of starkness to the story his assembled images seem to tell.
One representative example, “Mackay Street, Detroit,” begins in 2009, focused on a row of four detached houses, one of which seems to be under construction. Three of these houses have front-facing porches, relatively manicured lawns, and embody in nearly every respect the archetypal single-family suburban house regularly associated with the ideal life of the American suburbs. By 2011, the unfinished house has been obscured entirely by overgrown shrubbery; in 2013, beneath an overcast sky, three out of four houses are in obvious disrepair, the lawns resemble a wilderness, and even the sidewalk is cracked as if by tectonic forces. The final shot, from 2015, carries the sense of the calm after the storm–but the damage has been done, and even the final remaining house, now thoroughly uninhabitable, has lost most of its roof. The temporal aspect of GooBing Detroit offers, in this sense, the ability to infer a narrative simply through visual/environmental cues.
Yet the project at large feels somewhat hollow and lifeless—which may, itself, be the emotive intent of the work. By dwelling on the material debris of the foreclosure crisis, Alsup’s work runs the risk of sidelining the human experience from the visual record. GooBing Detroit has a clear preference for residential properties, but it is up to the audience to imagine the process through which each house became vacant, became a ruin, and became an empty field. Alsup, to his credit, seems aware of the limits of GSV as a visual medium, and supplementary textual material on the project’s website leads to a more comprehensive accounting of the social problem of foreclosure. But the visual material of GooBing Detroit nonetheless privileges residential property as the photographic subject, rather than the residents themselves. The ultimate result is a series of stark, depressing images that fail to evoke a sense of human empathy because the human subject is absent almost entirely from the scene.
Mackay Street, Detroit, Alex Alsup, GooBing Detroit, 2019.
Hazelridge Street, northeast Detroit, 2009-2018, GooBing Detroit, Alex Alsup, 2019.
If the fundamental question underlying all these projects is whether the technology of GSV enables a new way of visualizing poverty, then the answer is a resounding yes. It absolutely does. But the ability to simply see poverty—and other social and economic issues—in novel and compelling ways is of ultimately limited utility.[31]
The GSV camera obscures as much as it reveals. Where early practitioners of social documentary photography saw the shocking spectacle of the urban slums or the hardscrabble lives of indigent “Okie” farmworkers, they conceived of the core foundation of the social problem at hand as one of human suffering. The visibility of human pain was often the point. Conversely, GSV algorithmically obscures the human form and any of its identifying features. We cannot see suffering on the faces of the poor, so we read it instead in the land upon which they live. Using corporate surveillance software designed to document land and property as a medium compounds this problem, even when artists like Blinder or Alsup try to turn the software against itself. To whatever extent the social documentary form depends on developing empathy for human misery, GSV redirects this human relation to the lifeless visual form of property. It is from this visual representation of property that the audience must extract some meaningful reflection not just on poverty, but on social relations more generally–and the economic system which determines them.
The impossibility of transformative art under capitalism is by no means a new complaint among socially conscious artists, and it is what lurks underneath the representational problem of art with GSV.[32] Inasmuch as these GSV artistic projects redirect human empathy towards property, property itself is embedded within the system of capital simultaneously obscured and revealed by the form of GSV software. In his book Photography After Capitalism, the art historian Ben Burbridge offers a close reading of Jon Rafman’s aforementioned 9 Eyes project. Burbridge envisions “mass photography” such as GSV as the sort of “participatory, egalitarian, and inclusive experiences of making, using, and accessing photography” which “signal precisely the principles according to which society could and should be restructured.”[33] It is a lofty dream. The free, easy, and massive public access to GSV even suggests that it might be attainable. But what Rickard, Blinder, and Alsup’s work reveals, unfortunately, is that GSV’s innate emphasis on land and property over the identifiable human subject runs contrary to this ideal, and that the social documentary form demands engagement with common humanity that no corporate surveillance software, as yet, can offer.
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[1] Stephen Chau, “Introducing… Street View!,” Blog, Google Maps Blog (blog), May 29, 2007, https://maps.googleblog.com/2007/05/introducing-street-view.html.
[2] For a more comprehensive discussion of the technology behind GSV, see Dragomir Anguelov et al., “Google Street View: Capturing the World at Street Level,” Computer, June 2010.
[3] Competitor software also exists, but this essay largely focuses on Google’s proprietary software as it is by far the most recognizable and most comprehensive of such programs.
[4] Nancy Proctor, “The Google Art Project: A New Generation of Museums on the Web?,” Curator: The Museum Journal 54, no. 2 (2012): 215–21. For pedagogical applications, see, e.g., Abbie Brown and Tim Green, “Virtual Reality: Low-Cost Tools and Resources for the Classroom,” TechTrends 60 (2016): 517–19 or Susan Danby et al., “‘Let’s See If You Can See Me’: Making Connections with Google Earth in a Preschool Classroom,” Children’s Geographies 16, no. 2 (2016): 141–57.
[5] Stephen Shankland, “Google Begins Blurring Faces in Street View,” CNET, May 13, 2008, Online edition, https://www.cnet.com/news/google-begins-blurring-faces-in-street-view/.
[6] Claire Cain Miller and Kevin O’Brien, “Germany’s Complicated Relationship With Google Street View,” Blog, Bits: Business, Innovation, Technology, Society (blog), April 23, 2013, https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/germanys-complicated-relationship-with-google-street-view/. For a more current discussion of GSV in Germany, see Frank Jacobs, “Why Germany Is a Blank Spot on Google’s Street View,” Big Think, September 26, 2019, https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/germany-street-view.
[7] See, e.g., Martin Power et al., “‘Why Bother Seeing the World for Real?’: Google Street View and the Representation of a Stigmatised Neighbourhood,” New Media & Society 15, no. 7 (2012): 1022–40.
[8] Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Google Tops Market Cap Of $1 Trillion,” New York Times, January 17, 2020, New York edition, sec. B.
[9] This quotation comes from the marketing copy on the GSV landing page at https://www.google.com/streetview/.
[10] Jon Rafman, 9 Eyes, online photo-series, 2008-present (ongoing), https://9-eyes.com/. Quotation from Jon Rafman, “IMG MGMT: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View,” Art F City, August 12, 2009, http://artfcity.com/2009/08/12/img-mgmt-the-nine-eyes-of-google-street-view/.
[11] Michael Wolf, Fuck You, online photo-series, 2010, http://photomichaelwolf.com/#fuck-you/1. Published in book format as Michael Wolf, FY (Berlin: Peperoni Books, 2010).
[12] Tim Tetzner, If The Eyes Can’t Touch (Blurred Modernism), photo-series, 2018, http://www.timtetzner.com/files/Scharaun_BlurredModernism.pdf.
[13] Jacqui Kenny, The Agoraphobic Traveller, online photo-series, 2016-present (ongoing), https://www.theagoraphobictraveller.com/.
[14] Kenny’s website lists a forthcoming book version of The Agoraphobic Traveler in 2021. Google featured Kenny’s work in the “Stories” section of their website: https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/stories/agoraphobic-traveller/.
[15] Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America 1890-1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 26.
[16] “Reading,” in this sense, suggests a certain critical relation to photography detailed in Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989).
[17] Keith Gandal, The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 11-12.
[18] For more on the FSA photography project, see Cara Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2004) and Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992).
[19] Martha Sandweiss, “Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the Digital Age,” Journal of American History 94, no. 1 (2007): 195-196.
[20] Roy Stryker and Nancy Wood, In This Proud Land: America, 1935-1943, as Seen in the FSA Photographs (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 19, quoted in James Curtis, “Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, and the Culture of the Great Depression,” Winterthur Portfolio 21, no. 1 (1986), 1.
[21] Associated Press, “‘Can’t Get a Penny’: Famed Photo’s Subject Feels She’s Exploited,” Los Angeles Times, November 18, 1978, sec. B1.
[22] For a more comprehensive historical treatment of Rogovin, see Christopher Fulton, ed., The Social Documentary Photography of Milton Rogovin (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2019).
[23] Holly Metz, “Milton Rogovin: Seeing the Forgotten Ones,” Labor History 38, no. 4 (1997), 509-511.
[24] For a discussion of “ruin porn,” see Andrew Gansky, “‘Ruin Porn’ and the Ambivalence of Decline: Andrew Moore’s Photographs of Detroit,” Photography and Culture 7, no. 2 (2015): 119–39; Siobhan Lyons, ed., Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018); or Tim Strangleman, “‘Smokestack Nostalgia,’ ‘Ruin Porn,’ or Working-Class Obituary: The Role and Meaning of Deindustrial Representation,” International Labor and Working-Class History 84 (2013): 23–37.
[25] Spring Warren, “Screen Captures: Americans on Google Street, an Interview with Artist Doug Rickard,” Boom: A Journal of California 2, no. 4 (2012), 18-19.
[26] Justin Blinder, “Absence in Context: Recontextualizing Civic Data, Critical Cartographies, and Gentrification in New York City.,” Ubiquity: The Journal of Pervasive Media 4, no. 1 (2015), 34.
[27] For an example of crossfading and .gif animation, see, respectively, the first and second attached images from Vacated.
[28] Blinder, “Absence in Context,” 30.
[29] Ibid, 101.
[30] Gutman, Marta. “Vacated (Justin Blinder).” Essay in Design and Violence (exhibition), January 21, 2015. https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designandviolence/vacated-justin-blinder/.
[31] The notion of panoptic street-level photography predates GSV, but the notion of using this method to document poverty is wholly novel. Rand McNally “Photo-Auto Guides” offer an early twentieth century example of a similar project. This topic remains underexplored; see Tristan Thielmann, “Linked Photography: A Praxeological Analysis of Augmented Reality Navigation in the Early Twentieth Century,” Beiträge (blog), April 5, 2016, http://www.mobilemedia.uni-siegen.de/2016/04/05/linked-photography/.
[32] For commentary outside the realm of visual arts, consider Paul Wolinski, “Fully Automated Luxury Composition,” Journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music 7, no. 2 (2017): 8–15. Wolinski, an experimental musician as well as a scholar of popular music, considers whether algorithmically-generated music can “resist the pressures of capitalism.”
[33] Ben Burbridge, Photography After Capitalism (London: Goldsmiths, 2020), 19.
