In the age of digital photography, it is easy to create a virtual imprint of physical things. A push of a button and whatever is within certain dimensions of the lens is captured, removed from its material reality, and made readily and remotely available on any number of screens.

It is a mundane fact that images of this sort populate our reality in ever increasing numbers. We’ve all seen the Eiffel Tower even though only a fraction of us have been to Paris. Most of us know what Kim Jong Un looks like.

One of the most thorough image-collecting projects in human history is that of Google Street View. It is from this robust bank of documentation that artist Christopher Robin Nordström works. He constructs highly detailed miniatures of Tokyo buildings from a Skeppsholmen studio, making physical imprints of digital images.

Nordström has never actually visited any of the buildings he constructs. He uses Google Street View to identify his subjects. The models he produces are portraits of these buildings (or a portrait of a portrait), and not exact replicas.

Physical proximity isn’t the only way Nordström makes things difficult on himself. The most commonly used scales for building reproductions are 1:50 and 1:100. Nordström selected a scale of 1:20, a decision made for the admirable and slightly masochistic reason of not wanting to ‘cheat.’ It’s a nice idea. When one considers its implications, namely that Nordström is constructing his designs almost entirely from scratch, it starts to sound a bit insane.

Nordström’s handling of his materials, which commonly include MDF board, styrene plastic, brass, and wood, is deft. His attention to unique wear on the buildings of the entropic Japanese metropole is meticulous. Chipping, rust, even the splatter of dirt is visible in his designs. His works serve as vignettes telling the story of lives lived in and around the buildings he reproduces. It is an interesting approach to both architecture and anthropology, one in which Nordström learns more than an interview or a blueprint could convey.

Nordström’s buildings pass through two filters. First, the filter of image, then filter of material reproduction. It may be these distancing factors which lend his work an uncanniness despite their being hyperrealistic. It’s a strange effect, a ghostliness that eludes more exact reproductions, one reminiscent of the warped perspective of Google Street View itself.

“En plein air” art, or art rendered from a direct physical view of its depicted object, aims to capture the essence of a thing which only material proximity contains. Nordström’s work is the opposite. By starting from an image as the foundation of his reproductions, he captures a different sort of essence, the essence that only an image can contain.

But do images have essences? If so, what is their nature?

In the early days of photography, it was a common superstition that photographs snatched souls. The idea was that a picture first stole and then stored some central essence of whatever it depicted. For this reason, many avoided having their image captured.

Whether we believe this now (it would certainly have interesting implications about the souls of frequently photographed celebrities) Nordström’s project of attempting to extract some material essence from images, rather than extracting images from real physical things, is an interesting reversal of contemporary trends, one that begs the question: is a life surrounded by digital images good for us?