CARINE & ELISABETH KRECKÉ
Unincorporated
A Google Street View based essay
“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.”
Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977
Whiteclay, Nebraska
Jacob Street / NE 87, Whiteclay, Nebraska, USA
GOOGLE STREET VIEW 2013 © GOOGLE Inc., 2013
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Whiteclay is a small settlement at the border between South Dakota and Nebraska. The tiny town is crossed by one single asphalt road, the NE-87. Population is 10, as of the latest population census (2010). The legal or administrative status of Whitelcay is 'unincorporated.' In the United States, this typically characterizes remote, outlying, sparsely populated or uninhabited areas. For ages, this would be the place where people come for alcohol. The selling and consumption of alcohol has always been prohibited on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation, which is only a few miles away. The main village of the reservation is within walking distance. Selling booze has become a lucrative business model for liquor shop owners in Whiteclay, where drinking is allowed. People would come here and never leave. They'd become homeless, and literally drink themselves to death in the filthy streets of that tiny town. For the Pine Rigde residents, Whiteclay is of course a tragedy. Reportedly, most families lost someone to that place.
NE 87, Rushville, Nebraska, USA
GOOGLE STREET VIEW © GOOGLE Inc., 2012
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On Google Street View, Whiteclay is incorrectly labeled as Rushville, even though Google Maps lists it under its real name. The town itself has no traffic, no tourism, and no businesses beyond four or five liquor stores. Yet, curiously, the camera-mounted Google cars returned there again and again: first in October 2008, then in May 2012, August 2013, and finally in 2021. Four visits in just over a decade—roughly the same frequency as a metropolis like Philadelphia. The cameras did not stop at the main street; they ventured into side roads and back alleys, recording people stranded in backyards or taking shelter beneath trees. For reasons unknown, the misery haunting Pine Ridge through its “unincorporated” outpost of Whiteclay seems to have been of persistent interest to Google’s content makers. On Street View, it is laid bare with chilling clarity.
Westover St. Rushville, Nebraska
GOOGLE STREET VIEW © GOOGLE Inc.,
2013
Jacob Street, Rushville, Nebraska
GOOGLE STREET VIEW © GOOGLE Inc., 2013
Jacob Street / NE 87, Rushville, Nebraska
GOOGLE STREET VIEW © GOOGLE Inc., 2013
Westover St, Rushville, Nebraska
GOOGLE STREET VIEW © GOOGLE Inc., 2013
NE 87, Whiteclay, Nebraska
GOOGLE STREET VIEW © GOOGLE Inc., 2013
NE 87, Rushville, Nebraska
GOOGLE STREET VIEW © GOOGLE Inc., 2012
Before noticing Whiteclay (mislabeled Rushville by Google) on the map, we had passed through that town by car. That was in the summer of 2010. Upon arrival, we didn't have a clue about what was going on there. Normally, larger groups of homeless people can be seen in big cities. But in a vast, empty, rural area, it struck us as unusual. As we were in the region for another artistic inquiry, my first reflex was to take pictures of that place at burst speed. Just like Google, I took a lot of shots from the car, while my sister was driving. Several times, we drove up and down the NE-87 that divides the town.
To photograph people is to violate them
Susan Sontag
When checking the photos I'd taken that day, I perfectly got what Susan Sontag meant when she said: "To photograph people is to violate them". I had the feeling I was robbing the last dignity of the people lying dead-drunk by the side of the road.
Can we—or should we—show everything? This is a dilemma that every documentary photographer inevitably encounters: the fraught question of whether it is legitimate to expose the suffering of others. In my case, I chose not to show my photographs of Whiteclay. Instead, I turned toward the labyrinth of vision machines and surveillance imagery. How should we interpret Google’s footage of Whiteclay through the lens of geospatial intelligence? Can such images even be meaningfully analyzed, or are they merely accidental documents of human misery in a remote corner of the world? And what of the voyeuristic charge—can it be applied to machines that record automatically, without intention? Wouldn’t it be absurd to accuse them of voyeurism?
Epilogue
Jacob Street / NE 87, Rushville, Nebraska
GOOGLE STREET VIEW © GOOGLE Inc., 2021
In 2021, Google Street View gathered evidence indicating that things eventually changed in Whiteclay. The beer stores all seem closed now. Many have been torn down. Half of the town has become a deserted landfill. At the north entry of town, on the side of South Dakota, the words HOPE have been written on an abandoned truck. At the south entry, on the Nebraska side, a nursing home was built...
NE 87, Rushville, Nebraska, USA
GOOGLE STREET VIEW © GOOGLE Inc., 2021