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Jon Rafman - The Open College of the Arts

To find out more details about the transfer to The Open University see A New Chapter for OCA.

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Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman
I have only recently comes across 9-Eyes, an ongoing internet based photographic project started in 2008 by Montreal based photographer/artist Jon Rafman. He searches Google Street Views, selects certain images, usually with a strong narrative content, takes a screen shot and then adds it to his site. The original images were taken by the Google cars which are equipped with 9 cameras attached to a pole that automatically take photos every 30-60 feet, Google started their street view project in 2007.
Although Jon is currently overwhelmed with commitments and deadlines he did very kindly give me an overview of 9-Eyes, “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 were able to perform true documentary photography, capturing fragments of reality stripped of all cultural intentions.”

The snapshot aesthetic of the images doesn’t take away the complexities of the narrative, why is there a tiger roaming around an industrial estate for instance? You could cite a number of photographers who have worked in a similar way capturing the bizarre and wonderful events of everyday life, Richard Billingham, Corine Day, Larry Clark and Nobuyoshi Araki to name but a few. The difference of course is that the images that Rafman chooses to use are devoid of any human interference into the actual act of seeing, composing, and taking the photograph. They are random images taken by a machine, the ultimate surveillance model that owes Jeremy Bentham a pat on the back for his original ‘all seeing but not to be seen’ Panoptican design. The Panoptican was proposed as a new prison by Bentham in 1787 and functioned as a round-the-clock surveillance machine. Its design ensured that no prisoner could ever see those who were watching from the central location within the radial configuration.

Jeremy Bentham’s Panoptican 1787       Google Street View fully equipped camera car 2009.

Jon continued with his thoughts on modern day surveillance, “today, Google Maps provides access to 360° horizontal and 290° vertical panoramic views of any street on which a Street View car has travelled. For the most part, those captured in Street View not only tolerate photographic monitoring, but even desire it. Rather than a distrusted invasion of privacy, online surveillance in general has gradually been made ‘friendly’ and transformed into an accepted spectacle.”
In a recent and very good interview in The Independent, Rafman was asked ‘Is he a pioneer or a plagiarist?’. The re-appropriation of imagery by photographers has a long and varied history, Richard Prince said of his iconic image Untitled (Cowboy), “I seem to go after images that I don’t quite believe, and, I try to re-present them even more unbelievably.” Rafman has chosen images that fit into certain categories; an underlying sense of violence, animals in strange places, bizarre juxtapositions, people on the street and many more. The images do represent a cultural photographic survey that connects the late 19th and early 20th centuries’ street photography and the ready mades of the post-modern era. What began as an internet based project (for both Rafman and Google), many of the images now exist as archival pigment print’s in the Saatchi Gallery
Do you think work created this way has the same merit as photographs taken by a photographer?
 
 
 
 


Posted by author: Pete Davies

12 thoughts on “Jon Rafman

  • I can not help but think of Mishka Henner and his Google images – these are of sex workers and he found the locations where they work through online forums dealing with prostitution. The resulting series “No Man’s Land” is a fascinating documentary project.
    Photographs taken via the Google car are different and one can not ignore them simply because they were not made by a “photographer” as such.

  • Merit as what? Surely that isn’t the point. The point is in the project as a whole. It is simply another usage of found objects and that has at least a hundred years of credibility behind it.

  • Google Street View has to be considered as a massive photographic project which creates images in a novel manner. Is it art then? Does the lack of human intervention in the process qualify as intentional, thus an artistic decision? Is such originality going to result in an honorary degree from OCA? I hope so!

  • Fascinating on many levels, not just the subject matter but also the method. In a large part it is focussing on editing, which is an art in itself. That idea of pointing a camera anywhere and then selecting what you want to reshow echoes nicely with the fact that cameras are so ubiquitous and in theory any one can take fairly decent point and shoot photos, so it is a comment on how we can make art now. It reminds me of those films where the public send in one minute clips and someone edits them to make a film. (Kevin MacDonald – Life In A Day). Here an anonymous person as part of a corporate (?) body takes all the footage and an individual then decides what is worth looking at in greater detail. Not sure about the way of displaying them , all in a long vertical strip. I almost want to see them as a film , as you would see them from a car window, a series of still shots. Thanks for flagging up , I hadn’t heard of him before.

  • I have a great passion for street photography,it is the nerves of anticipipation that you feel at the begining,and the buzz you get once your juices realy get flowing once you realy get going.
    But there is also another side!People come up to you if they are not happy with you photographing them,they have a right to there priavacy and you also have a right to respect that.
    With jon rafmans project you cannot say this,it seems
    (as with Jeremy Bentham)that he has made the descision to do the opposite,and invade the privacy of Streets,Peoples lives,without there knowledge,or prior consent.
    People may view Jon Rafmans work as art,i see it as a cowerdly invasion of peoples lives.

  • I suppose my first thought was that Rafman should get out more, vitamin D is generally good for you! Having said that, I wonder where the art starts here? Rafman appears to me to be curating from a prurient perspective – about what he considers visually interesting and with no apparent coherent narrative (other than each could be said to be rich with narrative possibilities); and now that he has opened the floodgates to all and sundry I can only see the visual content going in one direction.
    @ Tom Smith: Rafman doesn’t take the picture, he appropriates them in a seemingly random fashion and makes them available in all their gory detail. Without that availability the vast majority of these images would remain dormant in some cloud somewhere. Maybe the issue is with a society that projects them “virally” as Rafman describes. Surely your issue is with Google not with the Rafman’s of this world?

  • I think its great, the sequence of “random” events juxtaposed on the link like that (and obviously selected for the composition and content…) it makes you realise how wonderful chance can be.
    Its really cheered me up:-)

  • Very interesting analogy between The Panopticon and Google Street View…the camera on top of the car resembles the central tower in the Panopticon prison…very scary similarity. But I was somehow disappointed to learn how Jon Ratman felt about Google Street View.. “[they have a] spontaneous quality unspoiled by the sensitivities or agendas of a human photographer”
    Back to André Bazin then…“For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction
    there intervenes only the instrumentality of a non-living agent. For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man…” (The Ontology of the Photographic Image, 1945)
    Not quite so if Jon Rafman chooses and selects images with strong narratives and takes them out of their context, which is Google Street View itself.
    Is he contradicting himself?

  • Pondering on the voyeuristic nature of Google Street view and links to the idea of Panopticon. The difference in the way I feel about it is that Google Street View is there one second and gone the next,whereas the idea of the panopticon is that it
    watches over you the entire time controlling your behaviour.
    I personally quite like that feeling of a stolen moment seen by chance, and to me it does evoke ideas about street photography rather than surveillance and that idea seems to come trhough in the work I think that’s one of the reasons I liked Rafman’s work. Although the images chosen do look a bit snap shot – with the blurring and light issues, they are actually structured as though framed very intentionally. Along with the content that seems to work to give them a particular kind of feeling.
    I’m not sure about Wolf as yet, those images do feel more voyeuristic and intrusive – obviously the process is the same – but the content is different and for that reason it does seem to me as thought it might be questioning the surveillance aspect of it.

  • I too linked these images with the work of Mishka Henner, but there seems to be a difference in intent. Henner’s intent is also to point out anomalies and ethical questions whereas Rafman is coming from a different angle.
    There is another variation of this which to me is more creative because it actually involves taking photographs oneself. I read about it some time ago on our Flickr group and thought what a good idea it seemed. You choose a postcode and then go there to see what you find. I spend too long on the computer already, so the idea of spending even longer finding Google images to take apart and put together again in a different way doesn’t appeal. I’d rather be out there breathing in some fresh air.

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