Google Earth Inspires An Artist
“There’s an absurdity to living in an age when everything is photographed,” Mishka Henner, a Belgian- born artist, said recently from his home in Manchester, England, emphasizing that every bit of the earth seems to have been photographed and all of it is accessible online — including some of the world’s most secret places.
Mr. Henner embraces that absurdity for his own image-making. He is one of a growing number of artists making savvy use of the surveillance capabilities of satellite imaging and Google Street View in work that reflects the way the Internet age has altered our visual experience.
Mr. Henner takes a lofty view of what he sees as the multifarious activities of man across the planet — United States military sites, say or feedlots. Seen in wall-size photographs, these wide parcels of earth become specimens of the human imprint on the global landscape, presented with forensic clarity.
Mr. Henner underscores the way viewers are increasingly conditioned to see the world at a surveillance camera’s remove.
“My work is not just about surveillance,” said Mr. Henner, who is 39. “It’s also about aesthetics, it’s about surrealism.”
Take one series that will be shown in “Semi-Automatic,” Mr. Henner’s first solo show in New York, which runs through October 24 at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery. Called “51 U. S. Military Outposts,” it catalogs American military installations throughout the world. Mr. Henner was struck by the perversity of so- called secure bases being so exposed. He includes the location of each base by city and country as evidence of its accessibility.
Mr. Henner’s work is “at the crossroads of many different genres or practices,” said Quentin Bajac, chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who considers it “part of a strategy of neo-appropriation that you find in contemporary photography today with the Internet.”
Mr. Henner won an International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Art (2013), and he will be included in “Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015” at MoMA in November.
With the computer screen as his studio, Mr. Henner, using Google Earth, pinpoints a site on the map, zeros in and adjusts the viewing height according to the area he wants to include in the image. He makes hundreds of screen shots and laboriously stitches them together to make a final image. The photographs appear like drawings on a map, the meticulous detail taking on cartographic precision.
“It was a playful gesture at first,” Mr. Henner said of “51 U. S. Military Outposts,” explaining that he had based the idea initially on Ed Ruscha’s “Twentysix Gasoline Stations” (1963) or his “Thirtyfour Parking Lots” ( 1967), deadpan inventories of suburban banality. Documenting the military bases, however, became a typology of American global hegemony.
His use of satellite imaging began when he and his partner, Liz Lock, were documenting prostitutes in Manchester in 2010. While researching locations on the Internet, the artist discovered that some women appeared in the Street View images, which led him to make Google Earth photographs of them soliciting. This turned into his own series, “No Man’s Land.” With an eye in space, Mr. Henner said, he sees things he would never encounter with a camera on the ground.
“Semi- Automatic” i ncludes images from “No Man’s Land” and “Feedlots,” his pictures of cattle farms, including one showing a neatly tiled pattern of lines (cattle holds) and dots (cows) obstructed by a red oval mass. What seems like an Expressionist rupture is a lake of cattle waste. “Astronomical,” perhaps Mr. Henner’s most ambitious work, is a 12-volume, 6,000-page scale simulation of the solar system in book form that will be included at MoMA. A picture of each of the nine planets appears on its own page as a tiny dot in the vastness of space: Earth does not show up until Page 155 in the first volume, Jupiter on Page 283 in Volume 2. In between are mostly black pages, each representing a fraction of the distance between the Sun and Pluto.
Artists like Mr. Henner who rely more and more on the gaze of the Google Street View camera draw our attention to questions of privacy and surveillance.
Katrina Sluis, curator of digital art at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, refers to them as “Web archaeologists” navigating an “increasingly computational culture” to find the element of human experience within it.