No Man’s Land shows fifty-nine pictures of lonely women standing or sitting on roads in the rural outskirts of Spain, Romania, and Italy. Their faces are pixelated; supposedly they are sex workers. The photos were not taken on-site by Henner himself, but found by him on Google Street View whose camera car happened to capture these women as it drove by. To find such locations on Google Maps, Henner searched online forums where men share the location of sex workers. He then “drove” to these locations via Google Street View and checked to see if a woman was captured at that location by Google’s Street View car cameras. If this was the case, he selected one of the predefined viewing angles and secured the image with a screenshot. In addition to the book, the images have been shown in exhibitions as large prints, approaching a 1:1 scale, and video animation.

As an explainer video on Henner’s website discloses, the first volume sold slowly at first, with ten copies in two months, which changed after two months when No Man’s Land gained a lot of attention through online media and went viral. As a result, it became the artist’s best-selling book, which is why he even followed it up with a second volume in 2012, again with fifty-nine photos on 118 pages.

At the same time, the first volume became highly contentious in public discourse, as Henner’s approach challenged the ethics and mediatic layers of documentary photography in the age of platform capitalism. It also sparked controversy from a feminist point of view. For example, American feminist sex workers called for Henner’s book to be banned because he was endangering women’s safety and using depictions of them without talking to them or asking for consent, and even capitalizing on it. Since Google is known to have cared just as little about this, Henner’s second-level documentation could also be understood as a reflection on Google’s reckless accumulation of data and the collateral damage of their automated imagery, while also capturing the working conditions of sex workers and their position in relation to traffic infrastructure and internet giants. In 2013, the book was shortlisted for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.