In 1969 Ed Ruscha attached a camera to his car and drove down Sunset Strip, automatically taking a foto of every building on the street. These fotos noted the anthropology of place, the nature of photography, the implications of autonomous creation, the conflation of art and cars and sex and sun that was America, and low/common that was ignored by photographers before that. He made a book, titled it the most banal thing he could imagine (Every Building on the Sunset Strip) and made a masterpiece of a new kind of photography, one that prized newness and verisimilitude over human emotion or traditional beauty.
So now a new internet company called A9 has attached a digital camera to an SUV and fotographs buildings that correspond to Yellow Page ads, so that commercial information can be added. The same kind of fotos as Ruscha, the same techniques, and the same look (seeing the accordion fold of the 1969 text, there is a certain commercial energy, it looks like real estate ads or chamber of commerce boosting pamphlets or anything but art) all is missing from Ruscha is the utility that is found in the A9s.
A9 has made a realization of what art is then, with out really knowing. (ie Art is design divorced from function)
This was inspired by Eric Etheridge’s blog, with a good comparison of chateau Marmont by Rushca and A9. http://ericetheridge.com/photoblog/archives/2005/02/ed_ruscha_inter_1.html