Walking down memory lane
Google street view, photography, and memory
In February 2020, I was suppose to travel to Macau, where I grew up, to visit my parents. Covid cancelled those plans, and I ended up travelling to Europe instead (another story for another post). Two weeks after returning from that trip, the world went into lock down.
Several months into the lock down, still sad that I hadn’t been able to travel back to Macau, I stumbled across @streetview.portraits, an Instagram account that uses Google Street view to take photos around the world. I decided to try this out and take photo “walks” through Macau.
Whenever we are using Google street view, particular here in North America, the information is usually only a couple of years old and we see it as more or less an accurate representation of how that city street or business looks like.
Somehow the most recent information that Google street view had for Macau was from 2008. This made these photo “walks” more time-travel-visits and less photographic exercises.
Reflecting on this at the time I wrote:
“I'm realizing that despite how much I enjoy this project, the fact is that a lot of the google street views are giving me a false sense that nothing has changed in Macau. So much has changed and I'm a sucker for nostalgia and need to be mindful of that. I need to realize that just like I have changed, Macau has changed and is continuing to change.”
After about a month or so of going on a couple of photo “walks,” I ended the project. Looking back on it now, I’m still left with the bigger questions that this experiment brought up.
Looking into the future, how will we interact with our own pasts when we are able to literally walk down memory lane? Google street view is only in its 17th year of operation, and as it becomes older and older, what will it do for the study of history when we might be able to digitally walk the streets of a place and see what it looks like 20 years ago, 50 years ago, and maybe even 100 years ago?
This photo series and more photos of Macau can be found on my @expiringcity instagram account.
My natural instinct with photography is to be a documentarian above all else. I have this keen interest in documenting what things are like now, for later. I’m gullible to the assumptions that photographs are real and not manipulations of reality, like I think we all can be from time to time. With Google Street View, I’ve long felt this worry that, like AI automation, I’ve been replaced by technology. Someone documenting the human geography of a place would’ve had historical merit 20 years ago, but now? There’s a widely accessible archive going back 15 years that does that job in a more comprehensive way than I or any one photographer ever could. I think that’s why I also try documenting more candid moments, personal memories, and have also shifted more towards abstraction in some cases.
Love this. I visited Macau years ago (2002) so these images sort of correlate to my distant memories…