Walking Past/10 Downing Street

Created in 2018, this series evolved as part of an investigation into what sharing, appropriation, and copyright might denote in relation to the Internet. In particular, I was interested in the images with which we take as part in the practice of remediation. Whilst revisiting Martha Rosler’s work House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967–72), I was struck by the simplicity and effectiveness of these collages. I decided to experiment with material that also relates to war and home, albeit material taken from contemporary sources. When searching for images I came across one holding image for a photograph titled ‘Syrian women walk past destruction in the Baba Amr neighborhood in Homs’ and eventually located it on Flickr under ‘Freedom House’. This account is related to a U.S. government-sponsored institution that supports journalistic work in areas of conflict and the photographer’s name is not displayed. I searched for more images of civilians in Syria from 2011 onwards and found little material apart from a set of press photographs of women and children in Aleppo and Homs. Out of necessity I utilized some of these stock images, mindful of them being representatives of ‘the poor image’ as put forward by Hito Steyerl. I combined them with screengrabs taken on a walk around 10 Downing Street on Google Street View. The intention behind this was not only to question what is shared and how, what belongs to whom, but also what we choose to see. 

This series is part of my doctoral thesis Digital Porosity and its Impact on the Mediation of Networked Images (2020), University of Plymouth.