You Were Never Here

You Were Never Here, applies Google Maps' "Report a Problem" feature, a tool designed to blur faces, homes, and license plates from Street View, to a private family photo archive that has never been online.

You Were Never Here references the Google Maps "Report a Problem" feature, a tool that allows users to request the removal of homes, license plates, and mailboxes from public view. Google Maps routinely captures unstaged scenes of everyday people, automatically blurring faces and identifying markers before those accidental portraits reach a viewer. The same gesture is applied here to a family photo archive that has never been online. These outdoor portraits were never indexed, never scraped, never passed through the Google eye. And yet that tool arrives anyway, applied by choice to images that were never asking for it, decades late to subjects who were never in its path. The backs of the photographs are included, their handwritten notes and inscriptions partially blurred, withholding the full scope of information the image once carried. Each placement of the erasure comments on the complexity of once-connective relationships to people, places, and things no longer bound in that fleeting moment. Questioning what it means to extend that accidental documentary gesture to portraits the Google vehicle never passed, never captured, and never knew existed.