No Man's Land — Mishka Henner

No Man’s Land represents isolated women occupying the margins of southern European environments, shot entirely with Google Street View. In this work, Henner appropriates the automated vision of the camera car to construct a portrait of lives glimpsed, overlooked, and dispersed across the networked landscape. The project reframes both documentary and surveillance, exposing how technologies built to map the world also capture its social and moral peripheries. By removing himself from the act of photographing, Henner turns authorship into a form of remote observation, implicating viewers in the same detached gaze that produced the images. The result is a meditation on visibility, power, and the uneasy space between empathy and exploitation in a world increasingly imaged by machines.

Archival pigment prints, billboard prints
Single-channel video (06:48 mins) & audio track (21:00 mins)
20x24 inches (51x61cm) / 46.9x 39 inches (119x99cm) / 97x118 inches (248x300cm)
Softcover print-on-demand books, 8×10 inches (20×25 cm), 120 pages

“The control and manipulation of vision is central to my practice, particularly the ways in which technology reshapes how we perceive reality. In a world saturated with images, I've become fascinated with the tools and systems that influence and often obscure our understanding of the spaces we inhabit. Networked culture, with its decentralized flow of information, provides a unique opportunity to traverse institutional and geographical boundaries, enabling me to produce alternative visions of realities.

With No Man's Land, I infiltrated online forums where men exchange detailed information about locations frequented by sex workers and was particularly drawn to remote locations in Spain and Italy. The imagery of isolated human figures set against expansive fertile landscapes had a haunting, almost prescient quality, amplified by the imperfections and glitches inherent in Google Street View's imagery. These digital spaces reveal unsettling dynamics, as some users leverage Google Street View to voyeuristically gaze at isolated women, while others objectify them through rating systems akin to consumer reviews. By correlating this informal, user-generated location data with official European Union reports on sex work across Europe, and sourcing amateur audio recordings of birdsong captured at these same locations, I constructed a visual and auditory map that straddles the boundary between virtual voyeurism and physical reality.

No Man’s Land is one of my many attempts to reimagine documentary photography for the 21st century—a unique moment in the early 2010s when new technologies allowed for forms of visual documentation previously impossible. It explores the tension between visible and invisible spaces—both online and offline—and questions our role as observers within digital landscapes. It also continues my investigation into the blurred lines between observation and surveillance, authenticity and manipulation, revealing hidden structures of power and vulnerability inherent in contemporary image-making technologies.”

— Mishka Henner

Carretera de Fortuna, Murcia, Spain

Henner’s photographs articulate a very subtle but persuasive challenge to the manner in which we all become ‘resources’ to capital in the contemporary world, what the philosopher Martin Heidegger called a ‘standing reserve’: how, ultimately, we are all merely data to be processed and presented and somehow used. The prostitute, then, is simply presented as an instance of an ‘ideal subject’, as indeed she has been throughout the history of modern capitalism: simultaneously a small entrepreneur who is also her own product, and necessarily a consumer too. No Man’s Land, seen through this lens, is a layer on the map of technological capitalism, a cartography of its reach and its complex interconnections.

— Daniel Jewsbury, Source