Photographer Jacqui Kenny found a way to travel the world and take amazing photos without spending a single dollar. How, you ask? Through Google Street View.
Kenny has collected over 27,000 screen grabs from virtually touring different cities around the world using Google Street View. She’s spent days scouring every street to look for a striking subject then hits shift-command-3 on her keyboard to take the shot. “It’s a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack,” says Kenny in an interview with Wired. “You go around every street hoping you’re going to catch a moment, but that only happens if you spend enough time looking.”
Kenny suffers from agoraphobia, a type of anxiety disorder in which she’s being pressed by places or situations that might cause her to panic. Call it a blessing in disguise if you will, but she used it to her advantage by starting up a project (she has taken screen grabs from Google Street View a few years prior), and hasn’t looked back since. Her fear got translated into a beautiful project that lets her explore places she knows she’ll never get the chance to visit.
It seems like Kenny is fond of capturing landscapes and otherwise mundane scenarios and turning them into magical, picturesque scenes. Her Instagram blew up within the next year after she started, amassing over 36,000 followers.
Offline, Kenny is still a photographer. “I always give my pictures ratings 1 out of 10 and I’ve only gotten as far as an 8,” she says. “I haven’t found the ultimate moment. That’s what drives me. Out of billions of images, surely there’s a 10 out there somewhere.”
This story was first published on Wired. Photos courtesy of Jacqui Kenny on Instagram.