Google Street Views © Jon Rafman
Future of photography exhibitions always intrigue me. I find them interesting not because they give me wormhole access to content that lives just beyond art’s event horizon, but because the exercise of curators lusting for predictive immortality while displaying a passive hostility towards the status quo they've created makes for curious sport.
Most of the future of photography conversations inevitably end up being about the now of photography. And the now of photography, like all trending things, rarely ends up being the tomorrow of photography. The now of photography is about the proliferation of images, digital manipulation and photography about photography. Like all art, now photography is reactive commentary on the world we live in and of the styles and processes that came before. If five years from now people are still appropriating images from Google Street View will we say we are living in the future?
