Photo of the Year 2019

"This is a very contemporary submission, raising relevant and ongoing questions such as surveillance of citizens – and their architecture – and authorship. When the photographer is a machine or a robot, how can we talk about authorship? And who owns the photos? Google or us? It´s a new way of using photographic technology for surveillance purposes, for protection, for wayfinding or for commercial purposes. Depicting the same anonymous corner with intervals and from various angles, the proposal unfolds a narrative of urban life, from random bypassers to a sudden dwelling of a homeless.
The proposal is unsentimental; what we are witnessing is a monitoring of everyday life with or without our knowledge or acceptance. And that goes for the architecture too."