Jacqui Kenny spent a full day wandering around Saint-Louis, Senegal searching for the perfect photo. She was about to give up when she rounded a corner and spotted it: Two women in head scarves walking by a mosque. The bright colors, long shadows, and symmetry were just right. Kenny pressed shift-command-3 on her keyboard and — snap — the image was on her desktop.
It's one of 27,000 screen grabs Kenny made while virtually wandering cities around the world on Google Street View. The photos capture sweeping scenes so striking you'd never guess they were created on a website most people use for directions. “It’s a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack,” she says. “You go around every street hoping you’re going to catch a moment, but it only happens if you spend enough time looking.”
Kenny, who lives London, suffers from agoraphobia, an anxiety disorder that provokes panic attacks whenever she's too far from home. When she lost her job in early 2016, Kenny spent a lot of time poking around on the internet. She made some interesting screen grabs on Google Street View a few years prior and decided to look for more. She quickly realized the project allowed her to explore locations she'd never visit otherwise. “I feel like I’ve kind of been to these places, even though I haven’t,” she says.
She spent the next year working exclusively on the project, exploring more than 1,000 cities around the world. Kenny normally got started after breakfast, plopping down at her computer and perusing the site until the wee hours of the night searching for something special—a dog scampering across a roof in Peru, kids hiding beneath a crate in Bolivia, or a comically huge cactus in Arizona. She particularly likes roaming arid, desert countries like Senegal and Mongolia. She posts the best photos to Instagram, and in just a year amassed more than 35,000 followers.
The images capture magical moments in otherwise ordinary scenes reminiscent of fine art photographers like Stephen Shore and Luigi Ghirri. It's only upon closer inspection you begin to notice discrepancies — a blurred face, a glitched road, a warped corner—that hint at the images' origin. Kenny especially likes when you can see the Google car's shadow or dust kicked up as it rolls by. "It gives it an otherworldly feel," she says.
Despite not pressing a shutter, Kenny is a photographer. She hunts for subtle beauty lost in the million of images that make up a virtual world. And she isn't stopping anytime soon. “I always give my pictures ratings 1 out of 10 and I’ve only ever got as far as an 8," she says. "I haven't found the ultimate moment. That’s what drives me. Out of billions of images, surely there’s a 10 out there somewhere.” Maybe just around that next corner.
