MARGET
LONG
Mathew Brady’s Skylight
Artist Books
Hunting Blinds
Nature Valley
Film + Video
MARGET
Mathew Brady’s Skylight
Artist Books
Hunting Blinds
Nature Valley
Film + Video
Nature Valley, 2013
Google’s quest to collect and sort every bit of data on the planet made it inevitable that its corporate cameras would eventually leave the city streets and venture off-road. Nearly thirty years ago, the company built its first portable Trekker camera—a bulbous, multi-eyed system worn like a backpack—first deployed across urban centers, and later to sites such as the Grand Canyon and the Galápagos Islands. In 2012, General Mills, the multinational maker of Nature Valley granola bars, launched a parallel project to photograph trails and other “assets” in National Parks using Immersive Media’s Dodeca platform.
Like Google, General Mills chose high-profile national sites—the same majestic landscapes that once drew Ansel Adams and his f/64 contemporaries. Yet unlike the mastery and precision sought by modernist photographers, trekker imagery is a high-volume enterprise, driven by speed, competing digital technologies, and data-mining interests.
Many artists—Jon Rafman, Doug Rickard, and Manuel Vázquez—have used Google Street View imagery to expand the notion of street photography while revisiting the ethical questions posed by documentary practice. The Nature Valley images extend these inquiries beyond the city and into the ethics of recording the natural world for profit.