‘No Man’s Land’ explores the margins of our urban and rural European environment as experienced by what appear to be women soliciting sex in liminal, post-industrial and rural settings, captured by Google’s Street View cameras.

‘No Man’s Land’ by Belgium-born, Manchester-based photographer and artist Mishka Henner. ‘No Man’s Land’ explores the margins of urban and rural environments in Europe as experienced by what appear to be women soliciting sex, all captured by Google Street View cameras. Sourcing locations from online where men share local knowledge on the whereabouts of sex workers, these areas were then visited online and re-framed using the Street View cameras.

The Street View project heralds a new age of street-level cartography, offering a vast visual archive ready to be mined by photographers seeking to make sense of our physical and social environment. Significantly, it combines three key features of our age: the dominance of the car, the accessibility of the internet, and the ubiquity of camera technology. Roaming the world capturing millions of images indexed only according to location, the unauthored and mechanical function of Street View challenges a vocabulary and grammar of documentary photography often tied to notions of authorship, authenticity and technical craft.

In navigating between online communities and the visual records on offer, Henner describes himself as an aggregator of sorts, finding the visual means with which to represent a number of cultural and social issues revealed by the technology.