Temporal Portraits
2014

The images below were taken from screenshots of Google Street View. Inadvertently reminsicent of Muybridge's motion studies, the disorienting composites involve three sources of motion: the person walking, the Google Streetview car driving, and myself turning in the Streetview browser in order to keep the subject in view.

A composite image of the same group of people on Street View in different moments, cut out and set against a white backdrop. They are closest to the camera in the center cutout. A composite image of the same two people of people on Street View in different moments, cut out and set against a white backdrop. They are closest to the camera in the center cutout. A composite image of the same person on Street View in different moments, cut out and set against a white backdrop. They are closest to the camera in the center cutout.

273 Instances of a Man in Busch Gardens

The images below are extracted from 273 screen shots of the same man on Street View at Busch Gardens in Tampa, Florida. Possibly a park or Google employee, the man walks, stands, squints, puts on his headphones, looks at his phone, buys some water, and occasionally sits. All the while, he’s caught in and distorted by the unique perspective of the StreetView camera, which doubles and halves him, stretches and condenses him, blurs his face into absolute blankness or renders it in impressive detail with a “© 2009 Google” on top. The varying blurriness of his outline (which I’ve endeavored to preserve) and these digital distortions, as well as the idea itself of a man having walked around and around Busch Gardens not exactly for pleasure, reveals a human parsed by a machine which itself still depends on a human for operation, orientation, and (likely in this case) chaperoning.

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Against a white backdrop, cutouts from Street View of a man wearing a blue polo shirt. The cutouts are mostly waist-up but sometimes show his whole body when he appears at a distance, in which case the cutouts are quite small. The man's image is sometimes cut in half by the processing of the Street View camera.

92 Instances of a Man at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk

Likely a similar situation to the one described above.

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Against a white backdrop, cutouts from Street View of a man wearing a light blue polo shirt. Many of the cutouts showing him walking at a distance frmo the camera. The man's image is sometimes cut in half by the processing of the Street View camera.