No Man’s Land – Mishka Henner

No Man’s Land explores the margins of our urban and rural European environment as experienced by what appear to be women soliciting sex, all captured by Google Street View cameras. Occupying liminal spaces in post-industrial and rural settings, the focus on these women also casts a critical eye on the Street View project itself and on photography’s indelible link to voyeurism and surveillance.

The Street View project heralds a new age of street-level cartography that offers a vast, regularly updated archive waiting to be mined by documentarians seeking to make sense of our contemporary condition. Significantly, it combines three key features of our age: the dominance of the car and the road, the availability of the internet and its search engines, and the ubiquity of cameras and surveillance technologies.

As it roams the world capturing trillions of images indexed only according to location, the unauthored and mechanical function of the Google Street View car also challenges a vocabulary and grammar of documentary photography often associated with notions of authorship, authenticity and technical craft.

Mishka Henner (b.1976, Belgium) is a photographer and artist living and working in Manchester, England. He operates in the genres of social documentary and appropriation art and embraces the self-published artist’s book as a means of transmitting his work.

His work has been published and commissioned by international print media including Der Spiegel, the Independent, and the Telegraph Magazine and his artist’s book, Winning Mentality was acquired by the Tate Gallery in 2010. In the summer of 2011, he will be a featured artist representing the new age of photography at Les Rencontres d’Arles in France.

He is a Profile photographer with Panos Pictures and is a member of the ABC Artists Book Cooperative.

www.hotshoegallery.com
www.panos.co.uk