When Google Street View was launched in 2007, virtual travelers could tilt down to see the car carrying the camera. In an update released the following year, the Street View car had vanished from view. Looking down revealed only the road. Since then, Street View aficionados have sought out glimpses of the cars’ shadows and occasional reflections in street-level windows. Like the turrets of Mark Hopkins’s mansion in the Muybridge panorama, these are the only moments when we see the invisible hand at work behind these corporate images of the city.
Google’s algorithms process the new user-submitted imagery just like official Street Views. They promise to blur faces and license plates. They monitor images and the people in them for obscenity, nudity, and crime. Given the choice, what kinds of photos will users submit: pictures that are empty of people or full of life? Elsewhere in Silicon Valley, software engineers have made the assumption that passers-by are distractions to be removed. But the empty, obstruction-free streets of computational photography are not new. They are bound up in the long history of economic control and the erasure of labor. The “grand style” urban photography of the late nineteenth century, for example, intentionally blurred out people on the street by using long exposures. In this lineage of image making, workers become anonymous or entirely invisible, and the products of their labor are swiftly and indelibly renamed for their employers—whether it is Mark Hopkins then or Mark Zuckerberg now, whose last name adorns San Francisco General Hospital.
Empty street views represent the ideals of industrial efficiency, a city that operates like a perpetual motion machine with little evidence of the workers that power it. In the second half of the nineteenth century, this meant immigrants, women, and child laborers hidden away in sweatshops, or Chinese railroad builders in the American West, who lived in separate encampments along the route and remained nameless in official accounts. Views made to celebrate modern, industrial cities hid workers in their places of employment, ignoring their hard lives outside work, just as their employers did. Pictures of laborers packed into tenement apartments or in the alleyways outside were classified as reform photography. This genre promised to show, in the words of photographer Jacob Riis, “How the Other Half Lives,” since they were invisible in city views that were underwritten by corporate interests.