Jacqui Kenny’s Therapeutic Virtual World View

Last year, amid the stress of shutting down a digital production company she’d co-founded nearly ten years before, Jacqui Kenny, a New Zealander living in London, began exploring the world on Google Street View.

Kenny now posts photos from the collection on an Instagram account called Agoraphobic Traveller, a reference to another impetus behind the project: Kenny, who is friendly and witty in conversation, suffers from anxiety that, on a bad day, can make it difficult to leave the house. Contrary to a common misconception, agoraphobia is often less a fear of open spaces than it is a fear of losing control.

Sometimes, she has difficulty going to aisles of the grocery store that are too far from the exit, and getting on a plane is a huge ordeal. To go to her sister’s wedding, in New Zealand, she told the New Yorker, required months of therapy beforehand. The Street View project has become a way for Kenny to visit places that she could never go to herself – the more remote, the better, she said.

Many of the photos share a clear, wide blue sky and look as though they were taken through a sandy haze. At first scroll, it appears as though they all could have been shot in the same place; in fact, they span from Lima, Peru, and Sharjah, UAE, to Winslow, Arizona. Kenny – who doesn’t consider herself a real photographer but clearly has a very particular eye – is drawn to stark landscapes and orderly arrangements: the straight lines of a road receding into the distance; a tree in perfect butterfly symmetry with its shadow; identical boxy houses sitting in neat rows.

If you pay attention, you can begin to identify various regions by certain signature motifs – Mongolia by its horses, or Arizona by its round, topiaried trees in the middle of its gravel front yards. “I love a good cactus,” Kenny said, and it shows.

Original article by Andrea DenHoed, The New Yorker, June 29, 2017.

Photo by Jacqui Kenny.


Tags: Agoraphobic Traveller  Google Street View  Jacqui Kenny  New Yorker (The)  

Amy Brown’s New Novel Inspired by Women and Art

Amy Brown’s New Novel Inspired by Women and Art

Like many writers before her, New Zealand-born Amy Brown takes inspiration from the Australian feminist icon Stella Maria Miles Franklin in her captivating debut novel My Brilliant Sister – but instead…