Toronto Photography Meetup Group

Strikes me as being the ultimate form of "spray & pray" photography, using someone else's billions of discrete images.

I leave it up to the experts to say if it is art but no matter how he sets up his camera it's still extremely derivative work.

Once in a while when I'm very very bored I take B&W shots of a movie on TV using a P&S or DSLR some of the shots actually look pretty cool.

I'm sure it takes some time and effort to find some of this stuff, but in my opinion, this is just stupid.

it's garbage. He's taking pics of other pics (poorly i might add) and passing it off as a "work"?

You can go to some internet sites who have compiled, listed some of the funniest photos from Google as well, but their websites are not winning awards, etc.. In fact, this guy probably used someone else's site to find some of the funnier ones.

What interpretation has he added? He moves the camera back and forth? At least Tosh.0 makes funny comments about the videos he gets on the net.

Journalism? So if i take photos of CNN, BBC, CBC news feeds and put the images together, that is journalism? Sounds like someone who doesn't like to leave his house.

Taken as a project or compilation, i think it can certainly be claimed as art. The choice of what to include and how to arrange / display is the artists contribution.

If i were to take 1000 photos taken by other people and somehow "Arrange" them, it would be my art, even if the photos are not mine.

However, taken as a single, i think he adds nothing to it. If it was a photo of a computer with this on screen, it could be construed as "his" due to composition and whatever message that overall image sends, but simply taking a photocopy of something for the sake of passing it off as "yours" because you took the copy, i do not think makes for art...

That sounds like calling museum directors artists just because they compiled an art exhibition of artworks.

and the arrangement has no particular meaning.

If they were put together so that each google photo corresponded to a color or theme, maybe, but i dont see it really. And even that, award worthy? no.

I have a movie collection of BluRays at home. They are "arranged" by alphabetical order and by movie/tv shows/concerts. Am i an artist for that arrangement? Am I director/film producer by arranging them in my order?

Only if you take a picture of it

Art is communication. With this photo, the artist isn't saying anything that the photo wasn't saying. So he's communicating nothing.

A person take a spoon and lean it against a gingerbread house and it's art. The person didn't create either the spoon or the gingerbread house, but he's communicating something by bringing the two together and making them interact. So it's communication, it's art.

Is it good art? Different question.

Art is anything you can get away with!

And sometimes what you can't.

So maybe the question is whether it's good art or not? To me, it's crap. Unimaginative. No more original than that painting, that everyone was dumping on not so long ago, and perhaps a great deal less so. That a picture of a random street image, someone else's at that, that was taken by an automatic camera and then photographed on a computer screen wins an award simply boggles my mind.

Total and complete crap.

In publishing if you take information from a book, chop it up and rearrange it into encyclopedia form without adding any interpretation to it, you can be successfully sued for copyright violation. Someone attempted to do this with the Harry Potter books and lost bigtime. I'm not saying this person should be sued, since this "artwork" is such a total waste of non effort and time. The point is that simple rearrangement isn't considered enough to turn an existing work (photo, book, painting, whatever) into an original work. As Metrix said it's just totally derivative.

You can call almost anything art and that being said is it good art? (subjective I know) but that is just bad and poor art at best.

I love them ... I find them unique!
these images sort of display daily mundane street activities from an ironic point of view,while integrating the virtual realm as part of that livelihood in a very voyeuristic style.

well Jackson Pollock is an artist and a painter as well. How about that? (I only wish I kept the rag I put on the floors when I painted my house.)

I'm not a fan. More a Tom Thompson or Franklin Carmichael man, myself.

if we don't run out of juice before that, fifty years from now we may well be traveling through virtual worlds, snapping very non-virtual shots to frame and hang in our crappers

projects like this pave the way towards this abstraction of life--hand in hand with digital imaging, which replaced the physical activity of the sun with the conventions of encoding and meta-interpretation, taking away the old requirement for the subject to have existed at some point in space-time

to photography of the future, projects like this are what lascaux was to the sistine chapel

a picture is only a picture (especially one that hangs in a crapper)

to focus (and lighten up) my "abstract" yapping a bit, some screenies from a $29.99 computer game...

great shots Vilk

Is it art? is it photojournalism?

I don't care. I don't know what or how to label it. I'm sure there's definitions and applications of art that I can't imagine or conceive of.
I do know that I enjoyed looking at some of the images. A guy with a friggin' machinegun caught randomly by google! the kids flipping the bird....it's funny, it's entertaining. An elderly woman mugged? He's taken us to interesting and compelling scenes. Some are interesting well composed blurry images that remind me of impressionistic paintings.
Sure he didn't take the images but he did find them, he did present them as a whole item with a theme. He turned google images in to a forat that made me do something I'd never think of doing: looking at Google street view images. So it doesn't belong in the Louvre or whatever equivalent photography museum there is (if there is one). It was still worth a good laugh and gawk at what they caught on the streets.

I'm sure we all have taken shots of alleyway graffiti. Is there much difference? We're just 'stealing' someone else's art.

Is it art? is it photojournalism? I don't care. I liked it.

good point, but we didn't get an honorable mention for them

Last year (I think) Gallery 44 had an exhibition of pieces created from Google Earth of airports.

Richard Prince made his name photographing other people's work.

Collage usually/often uses components that were not the creation of the artist.

As the old saying goes, art is what you can get away with.

+1

House/rap music was originally derided because it contained samples of other peoples' music. "These guys can't even play an instrument - they steal music from real artists" was a popular refrain. Like it or not - it still is an art form.

Not even speaking about performance artists, whose main craft is to sing/lip sync songs made by other song writers under the music made by other musicians.

No, I mean performance artists. Most pop artists are just performers. They don't write songs/music

I suspect he didn't even search street view to find his subjects. He most likely just used one of the many compilations of interesting Google street view locations.

http://www.streetviewfun.com/top-100/

I think it would take ages to find all of those on your own. I am gonna hit google maps

This is an awesome philosophical debate. Some people question if photography is art? Here, photographers are questioning if photographs of photographs are art. We're creating our own "Inception" here lol.

Sure, I think its art. It frames an event so the viewer can see it in a unique perspective. Its controversial and provokes a conversation that makes us re-evaluate our previous notions of art.