The Blue Hour

The Blue Hour documents Uri Gershuni's virtual return to Lacock, the English village where William Henry Fox Talbot pioneered photography, walked entirely through Google Street View. Where his first visit to Lacock was made in person, this second journey unfolds from a computer screen: 255 black-and-white images captured from the online map-image database, presented one to a page. Gershuni converts the borrowed screen captures into a classical, uniform photographic aesthetic, so the visible seams of the digital source, compression artifacts, stitching errors, oddly cropped views, sit against the stately reserve of the presentation. The project treats Google's surveillance-scale mapping infrastructure as a found camera, using the birthplace of photography as its test subject to ask what has and hasn't changed in the medium's relationship to place and looking. The book was designed by Gila Kaplan and published by The Green Box Kunstedition in Berlin.