The history of photography contains many instances of hauntings, perhaps most notably the Victorian craze for ‘spirit photography’, which purported to capture the presence of the unseen ghosts of the deceased. Taking the notion of haunting as evidence of the presence of something unseen, this paper explores how images of people – and other moving objects – make visible the algorithmic construction and fractured temporality of the Google Street View image. Though it focuses of the specific example of Street View, the ready availability of photo-stitching technology as a feature of digital cameras and smartphones makes the question of the photographic image’s relationship to time one relevant to a much wider field of photographic practice.

A photograph used to refer to a single embalmed moment in time, however, today’s digital photographic technologies – from straightforward panoramic images created on an iPhone to complex navigable structures such as Google Street View – speak to a radically altered temporality that encompasses many disparate moments. Examining an image of a crowd created using Microsoft Photosynth, Urrichio (2011) observes a connection between the semi-transparent appearance of some individuals and early long-exposure photographs where moving bodies often resulted in the appearance of ghost-like figures on film – the same quirk of technology that gave rise the to ‘spirit photograph’.

Navigating a street in Google Street View, people rarely appear so ghost-like, but regularly seem to emerge from nowhere only to vanish again when the user turns a corner or moves further down the road. Much in the way that clouds present ‘noise’ problems for satellite images, moving objects – people, cars and so forth – present problems for the photo-stitching algorithm that builds the image we see in Street View. Unlike the glitches that give rise to images of misaligned and strangely coloured landscapes, these ‘ghosts’ are not evidence of a fault in the system, but of the algorithm’s attempt to combine many disparate images, from different times, into single cohesive whole.

References

Urrichio, W. (2011) 'The algorithmic turn: Photosynth, augmented reality and the changing implications of the image,' Visual Studies 26 (1), pp. 25 – 35.