Connected: Nate Larson and Marni Schindelman’s geolocation work, and a Michael Wolf retrospective, at the Format Conference 2011
Photographic duo Larson and Schindelman won the Blurb Award for “Best New Idea / Work in Progress” last night. They make incredibly compelling work based on data streams which they collect, analyse, and use as the basis of their photographic work; the current project sees them take photographs of the geographical locations from which tweets were sent. They see their work as akin to “historical markers on the side of the road”, “taking virtual moments and pulling them back into the physical world” – in a world where we are aware of that everyone is doing without having to ask or make direct contact with them, is the social network becoming a surrogate for actual experience?
Michael Wolf's recent work with Google StreetView images bears testament to the impact of the internet on photography. Although he talked at length about his life as a photographer, discussing perennial favourite series ‘Architecture of Destiny’ at length, his recent work marks a phenomenal departure from his usual (and more traditional) work – and raised much controversy when it earned him an Honourable Mention from the World Press Photo Jury last month. He examined Google StreetView street by street, looking into every corner of an image, in order to find traces of a narrative: shadows, reflections in windows, signs of activity. It’s a huge body of work, an incessant travail, of great importance to the future meanings of photography.