A woman afraid to leave home, began to travel through Google Street View. And became a travel photographer!
In new York, the exhibition “the traveler with agoraphobia” — Jackie Kenny, who suffers from fear of open spaces. Kenny can’t go out, so she “travels” with Google maps in “Street View”, and the screenshots published in instagram. Now the collection of her pictures presented in one of new York’s galleries. At the opening, gathered the courage came and she Kenny.
A native of New Zealand Jackie Kenny most of his life he suffered from anxiety disorders and panic attacks. Her condition worsened when her work was forced to move to London: sometimes a woman just had to “run home” to avoid another panic attack.
Doctors diagnosed her with agoraphobia; in her case it is the uncontrollable fear of unfamiliar spaces.
Because of this, Kenny is trying not to go too far from home: a panic attack can happen even in a familiar supermarket: “I’m starting to think that I will panic, I will fall, I will collapse all the shelves, I might hurt somebody and embarrass yourself,” she says.
In 2016 Jackie Kenny left without a job, and reasons to get out of the house became even smaller. To somehow distracted, she began to “walk” in different cities using Google Street View, which allows to consider in detail the panorama of the streets and roads in many countries of the world. It’s grown into a real passion, and then in the whole project: Kenny started to hunt for interesting shots and camera angles that captured Google. Sometimes she spent at the computer 18 hours a day, looking for decent shots: in her words, 99.999% of what’s visible in Google Street View — “a complete nightmare”.
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The result was the archive of the 27 thousand screenshots, the best of which Jackie Kenny started to post in instagram with the name streetview.portraits. At first the woman did not advertise what is behind her passion, but then renamed it Agoraphobic Traveller.
Agoraphobia and anxiety limits my ability to travel, so I found another way to study mirjami Cannatrade agoraphobia
“For me to wander through the narrow streets of Peru is a great therapy, says Kenny. In real life, I would have thought only about how to get back home.” At the same time, according to her, Google Street View wasn’t it a virtual reality: “I’m just looking for visual experience. Thus it is impossible to truly immerse yourself in the culture, because well, you know, not talking to people?”.