Abstract:
Our commonest experience of photography is as a record of real things, people and places. We are inundated with an ever increasing volume of photographic images of the real through all forms of visual media. The rate at which amateur and professional photographers alike upload their photographs onto sites such as MySpace and Flickr, as well as the photographic documentation of the planet unfolding on Google Earth, suggest that we might eventually run out of real things to photograph. Cyberspace has become a vast repository of photographs of the real world, signalling the virtual replication of the actual. Microsoft¿s Photosynth project, for example, is realising this potential by tagging and spatially aligning different photographs of the same buildings, drawn from all over the internet, and compiling a simulated 3D replica of those buildings.
