“There’s an absurdity to living in an age when everything is photographed,” Mishka Henner, a Belgian-born artist, said recently from his home in Manchester, England, emphasizing, in particular, that every square inch of the earth seems to have been photographed and all of it is accessible online — including some of the world’s most secret places.
Mr. Henner embraces that very absurdity for his own image-making. He is one of a growing number of artists making savvy use of the surveillance capabilities of satellite imaging and Google Street View in work that reflects the way the Internet age has altered our visual experience. Mr. Henner takes a lofty view of what he sees as the multifarious activities of man across the planet, swooping down on the tracks of government or industry — United States military sites, say, or feedlots or pump jacks on oil wells. Seen in wall-size photographs, these mile-wide parcels of earth become specimens of the human imprint on the global landscape, presented with forensic clarity.
