No Man's Land
No Man's Land collects fifty-nine images of isolated women on the margins of southern European roadsides, all sourced entirely from Google Street View.
Henner found the coordinates on online forums where men trade information about the location of sex workers, then used Street View to see whether Google's mapping car had captured a woman waiting there; the resulting figures, faces pixelated by Google's own privacy blurring, appear as small, distant shapes against expansive fertile landscape. The book was self-published in Manchester as an open-edition, print-on-demand softcover.
The work was shown in the group exhibition "From Here On" at Les Rencontres d'Arles in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2013. Critical response has centered on the ethics of the appropriation: reviewers have noted the tension between exposing a form of surveillance and reproducing it, since the book identifies its subjects, however anonymously, as sex workers without their knowledge or consent. No Man's Land belongs to Henner's broader practice of mining automated and institutional image archives, alongside works built from satellite imagery and CCTV.
