You can take a virtual tour of almost any street in the developed world - and gives rise to a new and fascinating art

"All streets in time are visited."

- Philip Larkin, ambulances

In pre-computer world of the 1960s, various board games promised "all the thrills and spills" of Formula 1 or football "in the privacy of your own home." There was even a beer - "Beer at home means Davenport" - beer offers without having to go to the pub. This desire for voluntary house arrest since then has been so completely satisfied by the Internet, we now expect to be able to get, do and buy almost anything without leaving our dens. But who would have thought it might be a street photographer housewife? only realized this breakthrough, when Michael Wolf (born in Germany, 1954) have received awards of honorable mention in the 2011 World Press Photo of the job is sitting at his computer terminal, photography - and more and the fly - moments of Google Street View. Ironically, the wolf fell into this way of working when he moved from Hong Kong to Paris - one of the traditional high street photography - only to discover that the city had nothing to offer photographically. Compared with changing urban landscapes of Asia, Paris was an outdoor mausoleum which had remained virtually unchanged for over a hundred years. Haussmann in Paris had changed radically in the 19th century to mid-afternoon, but the pockets of the "old" Paris by Eugene Atget photographed will be familiar to any contemporary visitor. Atget made his living by providing "documents for artists" and the Wolf knew of the connection between Atget careful study of the city and the ability to deploy integrated Street View - if it does not understand -. Vacuum-crawl to his own artistic purposes quickly saw that the indifferent gaze of the Street View camera sporadically what he called (in a series as a result of this discovery) Unfortunate Events: altercations and accidents, and pukings Pissings, fighting and death. Street View cars usually unnoticed business - or at least neglected - but sometimes people react to your presence that sees everything, giving them the finger (hence the title of another series Wolf, the exercise). And if Wolf combed through miles and miles without incident image for boring moments that may or may not be decisive. This is not to represent a break, but a continuity with his previous work.

The Transparent City

(2008) Wolf took pictures of telephotoed tall buildings in Chicago, a project which itself was a extrapolation of the previous study of the architecture of the density that had fascinated him in Hong Kong. The results have been razed and light patterns depending on Hopper-esque occasional views of human beings trapped in the vastness of the urban geometry. Imagine the joy of Wolf, when he saw one of these apartments a reality TV show was a great rear window

! Yes, it was James Stewart with his telephoto lens looking at another person in your department, photographed by Lobo with it. (Was it a fluke exceeded this photographer? An occupant who is in the permafrost of the image as a generous gift of irony and warning anyone who happened to be a spy, or was it a Doisneau-esque element? artifice involved) Later, when Wolf was watching some other images through a magnifying glass, he saw something that had eluded him when the photo was taken: a resident in one of the windows of an apartment in a nearby building saw what was happening - and gave the finger. The pioneers of photography spontaneous - Paul Strand Street, Walker Evans in the subway, had come to end difficult to work unnoticed. For Wolf, being recognized and abused - people realized when being photographed - was both an encouragement and an invitation as an insult. After seeing this wonderful, pixelated face, we proceeded to trawl through each window in each apartment

Transparent City

to see what other intimate details had been inadvertently revealed. Perhaps the film could produce images that normally observed potential reality right? The results for the most part, were disappointing: boredom, isolation of the series as the people watch TV, or watched the computer screen. It is also possible that other undetected reciprocity was at work: some of these people very closely at their computer terminals could conceivably be scanning Street View, so that your own images

Blow-Up

or Stewart rear window

were forced, in its various forms, to confine their attention to a small fragment of their respective cities, Lobo had at his disposal a monitoring project on an unprecedented scale, which in turn is merely a strand in the largest network of state and corporate control of everyday life. Needless to say, curiosity Wolf soon went beyond their local origins. If he was bored hanging around the streets of Paris, which could bring another city in the world and see what happens there.
Instant long pan-Loup global drift, viewers soon discovered that there were a number of people who are roughly the same as the wolf. Almost exactly the same thing, actually. If you scoot around the internet, see the question of the wolf, which will not be long before Google - the search engine, not the cars of the camera - elbows in the direction of Jon Rafman, an artist who works with the same source material. Your website has made the culture of some of the same scenes as Wolf Google - whose images for