Left: Michael Wolf; right: Jon Rafman.

During the research for Raw File’s gallery earlier this week, Google’s Mapping Tools Spawn New Breed of Art Projects, I noticed several seemingly identical images in the projects of Jon Rafman and Michael Wolf. But in my discussions with the artists, I found it interesting that they considered them completely different images, altered by their own hand.

I decided to explore how a casual observer who hasn’t spent years thinking about authorship, photography and the nature of art and artist may dismiss the images as obviously identical, but an art history buff could fall down the conceptual rabbit hole lurking in that assumption. If you’re as intrigued as I was, take the red pill with me and read on. (Warning: No intellectual lifeguard on duty.)

Rafman’s Nine Eyes and Wolf’sA Series of Unfortunate Events are the two most well known and most circulated projects of the Google Street View (GSV) ilk. Rafman continues to add images to Nine Eyes, while Wolf has since ventured into newer sets with a geographical focus on Paris and New York.

Left: Jon Rafman; right: Michael Wolf

With billions of images stitched together in the street-view matrix, it is highly unlikely two artists operating independently of one another would happen upon nine identical scenes. On the other hand, in the huge dataset that is GSV, it’s understandable that artists would gravitate towards scenes that appeal to human emotion once they are identified and permalinked.

The overlap is explained by both artists using forums such as Google Sightseeing and GoogleStreetFunny to find images and spending hundreds of hours trawling the virtual streets for unique vignettes. It seems they both simply have similar tastes.

“I strongly disagree that mine or Jon’s images are repetitions of each other,” says Wolf. “The only thing they have in common is they were taken from the same street view page. But the resulting images are very different. It’s as if you would say an image taken by Martin Parr of a beach in Rimini is a repetition of an image taken by Massimo Vitali at the same beach. They both happened to have photographed the same location, but their images are not in the least similar, or ‘repetitions’ of each other.”

To be fair, for this analogy to hold, time would have to stand still on the beach and both Parr and Vitali would have to stand in the exact same place, but if we take Wolf’s point, the murkiness of authorship of these images starts to emerge.

Left: Jon Rafman; right: Michael Wolf

“For my series FY, the idea was to make a statement about how the general population reacts to the Google Street View camera,” says Wolf. “Through my extreme crops, and repetitions of the motif [the finger], I reinforce an idea. This differs enormously from Jon’s handful of images where somewhere in the photograph a person is flipping the bird. Jon is often interested in the GSV page as a whole, I am creating my own images through extreme crops which I use in specific contexts to make a point.”

Sure enough, on the issue of parts and the whole, Rafman is, in part, in agreement with Wolf. Rafman is not only interested in full-screen GSV grabs, but also the moods and narratives multiple screengrabs create through sequencing.

“Exploration is a fundamental human characteristic and I often organize my GSV exhibitions around the excitement of exploring a particular theme or place,” says Rafman. “The ongoing stream of images rather than a specific image is then the focus. The whole is greater than the parts.”

Rafman’s Nine Eyes holds a mirror to the surprises of Google’s world, whereas Wolf wants to interpret Google’s data and establish a statement of his own.

Top left: Jon Rafman; top right: Michael Wolf; bottom left: Michael Wolf; bottom right: Jon Rafman.

Referring specifically to two image pairings (above), Wolf insists upon his own agency, “No way these four images can be regarded as repetitions, they are entirely different images. The crop is crucial. Each photographer fills the frame differently.”

Wolf has a point, but his argument withers a little if we consider pairings with crops of insignificant difference such as the French couple kissing (below).

Left: Michael Wolf; right: Jon Rafman.

Considering repetition and authorship, Rafman brings up Marcel Duchamp’s early 20th century avant-garde concept, the Readymade. By virtue of his playful and rebellious presentation of industrial objects in galleries, Duchamp anointed bike wheels, standard rulers and plumbing porcelain as art, and as such made them his own.

“If two artists express or make use of an existing or ready-made vehicle, how are we to view it?” asks Rafman, “Is the first artist to present it the prime factor?”

The philosophy behind the Readymade gives a leg up to the first practitioner and legitimates their presentation. But Google Street View is not analogous to Duchamp’s near century old urinal; only Duchamp had the audacity to present Fountain whereas multiple artists have appropriated GSV.

It should be noted that pointing a camera at a screen is not something new. As Bremser points out in his intelligent essay How to Photograph the Entire World, both Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander made photographs of broadcast television, “Friedlander is attracted to those moments where the facade peels back from the relatively new, perfectly sensible electronic communications medium and reveals a 1/125th of a second of raw, unpolished humanity. The GSV photographers … seem to be looking for this same kind of moment,” writes Bremser.

Left: Michael Wolf; right: Jon Rafman

For traditionalists, the problem with GSV projects is one of engagement. Documentary photographer Alan Chin, speaking of Mishka Henner’s No Man’s Land expresses a view that can be applied to GSV projects in general.

“Google Street View is a navigational tool, an educational resource, and sure, it can reveal a lot about a place and a scene at a given moment in time,” says Chin. “But if you, the artist, are really so interested, then go there and take some pictures yourself. Post-modern, post-structuralist, post-whatever denizens of the art world and academia love this shit. But it has little to do with actual reporting and actual documentary work in the field.”

Chin then throws down the gauntlet to GSV artists: “It would be interesting to juxtapose the Google Street View with the artist’s OWN view of the same scene. That would bring the political/cultural meaning of the GSV into the work.”

Left: Michael Wolf; right: Jon Rafman

No matter how much artists try to stamp their own identity on GSV projects, the political reality may be that they are forever caught up in Google’s panoptic agenda.

“The unspoken reality or challenge in the question of authorship is the fact that Google has claimed ownership of all it has purveyed and filmed with an unmanned camera,” says Rafman. “Moreover, the sheer vastness of what Google has photographed, and placed a copyright sign on, is an imperial claim so vast that it mirrors England’s claim to an empire upon which the sun never set.”

Rafman describes Google’s claim to copyright as the “elephant in the room” and suggests that all artists’ responses to this sea change in informational supply – including his and Wolf’s – can be acts of inquiry and resistance.

“If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must acknowledge that we are now in the area of political philosophy and we must address whether such imperial claims warrant obedience and more importantly, how this new reality is to be reclaimed,” says Rafman.

Top: Michael Wolf; bottom: Jon Rafman.

Google is not the only internet operator to disrupt or attempt to redefine ideas of ownership and authorship. The ease of copying information on the internet and presenting it as your own or unattributed means that fame is often accompanied by anonymity.

“In Tumblr and blog culture, authorship tends to get lost as interesting texts get blogged and re-blogged without even the expectation of citation,” says Rafman. “I’ve had my entire blog stripped and reposted on someone else’s blog without attribution. In fact, you know you have ’succeeded’ on the Internet when your work is circulated so much that you lose authorship. The notion of an internet ‘commons’ can be a two-edged sword.”

Obviously, part of the problem in picking apart the issue of authorship is the nostalgia for the iconic single image and the demand for photographer-heroes. It is one thing to accept Google’s fully-automated image-making, it is another to see artists grappling with the issue by piggybacking on the technology to create work.

The answer? Rafman suggests artists accelerate the uncertainty. “I think it would be an interesting conceptual gesture if Wolf and I exchanged our respective versions of the ’same’ image.”