Hasta La Ideas

Noted at the excellent thingsmagazine.net is a new project from photographer Michael Wolf, who navigated his way through Google’s Street View map of Paris to create some beautiful images of the city…

Those familiar with Street View will know that in addition to capturing the topography of a city at street level, the programme also, inevitably, captures its inhabitants. With their circular, air-brushed faces, the majority of the figures digitised for Street View are largely unaware of the Google cars with their rooftop cameras.

Now the inhabitants of Paris also find themselves in Wolf’s artistic take on the Google mapping project. And he’s retrieved some lovely moments of people and things caught for a single arbitrary moment on a particular day in the city.

By way of an explantion of his intentions with the Paris Street View project, thingsmagazine offers this quote from Wolf:

“The problem is that compared to Asia, Paris is a stagnant city – very little has changed architecturally since Atget’s times, and the cliches are a nightmare to get out from under of. Strangely enough, it was Google Street View which enabled me to take any photos at all of Paris.

“I spent weeks going through the city on my monitor, street by street, looking into windows, discovering reflections, searching out interesting juxtapositions, topologies, trying various crops/styles (Frank, Doisneau, Ruscha, and so on). The lack of a third dimension wore me down at times, but it was quite an interesting journey.”

To see all the images from the project, check out the Paris Street View page at photomichaelwolf.com.