Virtual Street Photography

These photos are examples of Virtual Street Photography, a form of appropriation art originally developed by Doug Rickard, Michael Wolf and others. In this genre, rather than taking a photo at the scene like traditional street photographers, I used Google Street View to take a ‘walk’ through cities that I would probably never have the chance to visit and found images that I then photographed from the screen of my iPad with a Lumix or Nikon digital camera. Google Street View is completely automated, there is no human input, so when it captures striking images of everyday life, it does so dispassionately and serendipitously. The Virtual Street Photographer finds these accidental images, sometimes in the background or corners of the main image, and reappropriates them as art.