Living the screen
Published in Collective Hub issue 53, November 2018.
Struggling to LEAVE the house, Jacqui Kenny found FREEDOM through a SEARCH ENGINE. Here, the ‘Agoraphobic Traveller’ SHARES her journey.
Jacqui Kenny loves to explore deserts. From Arizona to Africa to the Middle East, she loves a dusty road lined with cacti, camels and lonely buildings. In 2016, she embarked on an 18-month journey to some of the world’s most remote corners, covering thousands of kilometres of terrain. But she never had to step foot on a plane. She did it all from the safety of her home in London.
For intrepid explorers who can’t (or don’t want to) leave home, Google Street View is a passport to the world. In Jacqui’s case, agoraphobia – an anxiety disorder characterised by a fear of seemingly unsafe spaces – was making it almost impossible to visit the local shops, let alone jet across the globe.
The digital production company she had co-founded a decade earlier had wound down and her colleagues dispersed to new and exciting roles. After years of avoiding meeting clients at the office, no one made her an offer.
“I was feeling crap. Like, really bad,” says Jacqui. “I didn’t know what I was doing with my life. And I wasn’t ready to face the world yet. So I thought, I’ll do a creative project.”
Jacqui, who’s originally from New Zealand, had been on Google Street View a year before. She’d used it to explore the streets of Brazil (while still at home), saving a few screenshots. Her sister had loved them, and suggested there might be more treasures to find.
Over the next year and a half, Jacqui amassed a collection of more than 27,000 screenshots, posting images to Instagram (@streetview.portraits), calling herself the ‘Agoraphobic Traveller’. She now has over 100,000 followers in 192 countries.
“I didn’t know if it would last. The idea of spending all day on Google Street View doesn’t sound very appealing, does it?” she says. “But it was amazing for me, because I discovered this whole new world out there. It became so much fun trying to find these little magic moments. So yeah, I got slightly obsessed. It’s just the nature of my personality. When I really get into something and absorb myself, that’s it.”
While she might be working with imagery she has found, Jacqui still has a distinctive style. Her screenshots are carefully composed, often playing with symmetry and stark angles to draw focus to the middle-of-nowhere feeling of the subject matter. The images are light-saturated to the point of overexposure, with stark shadows and pops of pastel colour. They also tend to be slightly warped thanks to Google’s 360 camera, something Jacqui loves to toy with. “It gives it a bit of a surreal, otherworldly feel,” she says.
So with the whole world at her fingertips, how did she know where to start? “Initially I looked everywhere and I was excited by everything,” says Jacqui. “Light is so important, so I was figuring out the places that produce great light. That’s places with really extreme temperatures, and really arid environments.
“The problem with Google Street View is that because you have no control over the images, there are always things in the way. So you need to go to places where there are no cars, or things that can obstruct the image. And the visual aspects that I like drew me to these out-of- the-way towns.”
As her Instagram following grew, it was inevitable that it would eventually capture Google’s attention. “I was really nervous about all of that, because at any point they could just contact me and tell me to pull it down.”
Instead, the search giant offered to organise an exhibition of her work – in New York.
“The New York trip was surprisingly… well, not easy. That’s not the right word for it,” Jacqui says. “Just easier than I thought it was going to be.”
She was accompanied on the plane by a film crew from Google that had come out to the UK to make a video about her work. A friend made her a survival kit for the journey, and her thousands of fans sent messages of support. “It made me realise that even if I did have a panic attack on the plane, it’s not the end of the world.”
In the end, Jacqui was too busy to feel anxious. “It wasn’t until I flew home to London; I had a panic attack on the train home from the airport,” she says.
Around 300 of Jacqui’s Insta-fans came to the exhibition opening, where her images were lined up along an eightmetre- long lightbox, arranged according to longitude. Visitors could don VR headsets to hear the story behind some of the images and see the 360-degree views surrounding Jacqui’s collection.
Getting prepared for the exhibition highlighted some of the idiosyncrasies in Jacqui’s filing system. “It’s a mess. I’m the worst filer in the world,” she says. Jacqui had to find the 200 images selected for the show among her 27,000-strong collection, and then collate the location data. That’s if she had kept the data in the first place.
“If I couldn’t find the image source, I had to go back to that country and look through the whole town again until I found that same picture,” she says. “That was probably the worst thing – me beating myself up over my terrible filing system.”
Now that Jacqui has had a successful trip overseas, she’s wondering if the dustbowls she’s so fond of in pictures are so out of reach. She has a couple more international shows lined up and, after that, who knows?
“As long as this project lasts I’m keen to push myself and see where it can take me,” she says.
“Prior to working on this project, I never talked to anybody about my agoraphobia or anxiety. And now I’ve told the whole world. I’ve got nothing to hide now, so it’s kind of lost its power over me a little.”
When her condition was at its worst, Jacqui says, “the world got really small”. Now it’s starting to open back up.
SCREENSHOTS FOR CHARITY
Fans of the Agoraphobic Traveller can now buy limited-edition prints of Jacqui’s Instagram posts. Google has given Jacqui permission to sell a limited series of images from her online travels, with profits going to the Brain & Behaviour Research Foundation, a global non-profit organisation that funds research into mental illness.
Jacqui had to work within strict guidelines from Google in choosing what to include in the series, and some of her favourite scenes didn’t make the cut. “I had to pick images that weren’t close-ups of people or anything like that,” she says. “But the guidelines helped my decision-making process.”
Of the tens of thousands of screenshots she has to choose from, Jacqui says, “I only like about 10 of them. My favourite ones are probably an eight out of 10. I’m always looking for that perfect shot.”
