Michael Wolf never left his apartment to shoot one of his most talked-about bodies of work. He opened Google Street View, found moments frozen mid-scroll around the world, and photographed his screen. The resulting series, "asoue," earned him an honorable mention at the World Press Photo competition, and it set off a debate that's never fully settled.
What Counts as Photography?
Wolf didn't take a single original photo in the traditional sense. He curated. He found a figure obscured by a lamppost, a blurred kid mid-jump, a moment of chaos on a sidewalk, all already captured by Google's cameras, and reframed them as his own work by choosing what to keep and how to crop it.
That's exactly what split opinion. Some argue the labor is real: sorting through the vastness of Street View to find a genuinely striking frame is its own form of authorship. Others see it differently, closer to archiving or curating an existing image than creating a new one.
The Same Question, New Format
That argument hasn't gone away. It's just changed shape. Right now, the same debate is playing out around photos people take of TVs and jumbotrons at concerts and sporting events, another case of someone pointing a camera at a screen instead of the thing itself.
If you photograph a screen, are you making something new, or just recording it?
There's no clean answer. But the question itself says something about how much photography has already changed, and how much of what we now call "taking a photo" doesn't involve pointing a camera at reality at all.
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