Final Project– Preliminary Research

For my final project, I chose to work with Michael Wolf, particularly his Street View body of works. I really enjoy Wolf’s work for the black humour and also the documentation qualities of his images.

Michael Wolf Discusses Using Google Street View for His “Photography”

These are some early notes and ideas I had from recounting what I felt when I first encounter Wolf’s work at Arles and after reading up a little on them.

Following that, I had some fun visiting places on Google maps. Other than the live street view, the Gmaps also had archives of older photos of the places for certain locations.

This is a photo of my secondary school after the renovation in 2014.

This is a photo of my first home after we leased it out to a childcare franchise, this was in 2009, the oldest archive they have but not early enough (2001).This is my current house earlier this year, after they repainted it.
This a photo from 2012, when it looked much better beforehand.This is Rochor Centre where I used to go over to study for my A Levels.


So with these, I went for consult!!!

And after consolidating some of the feedback, this is how I decided to proceed forward:

  1. As Gmaps is limited in terms of their archive, I will be looking into other archives like National Archives of Singapore, Urban Redevelopment Authority, Ministry of Education, Housing Development Board and news sites. I have decided to stick to images that can be accessed through the web and without special permission. This is a clearer definition of a public virtual reality.
  2. I have decided to start with my schools first as I feel that they will be a good starting point for my research for archive images. There are also more public archives who have images of them.
  3. I will be juxtaposing the official captions of the images with my own captions that are personal and based upon my memories.

Let’s see where this goes! 🙂