Doug Rickard: A New American Picture

by Doug Rickard

Doug Rickard's A New American Picture offers a startling and fresh perspective on American street photography. While at first glance the work looks reassuringly familiar and well within the traditional bounds of the genre, Rickard's methodology is anything but conventional. All of the images are appropriated from Google Street View; over a period of two years, Rickard took advantage of the technology platform's comprehensive image archive to virtually drive the unseen and overlooked roads of America--bleak places that are forgotten, economically devastated and abandoned. With an informed and careful eye, Rickard finds and decodes these previously photographed scenes of urban and rural decay. He rephotographs the machine-made images as they appear on his computer screen, framing and freeing them from their technological origins. As Geoff Dyer has commented on the work, "It was William Eggleston who coined the phrase 'photographing democratically, ' but Rickard has used Google's indiscriminate omniscience to radically extend this enterprise--technologically, politically and aesthetically." A limited-edition monograph of A New American Picture was published by White Press/Schaden in 2010; upon publication, it was named a best book of that year by Photo-Eye magazine, and quickly went out of print. This edition brings Rickard's provocative series, including more than 30 new images, to a wider audience.
Doug Rickard (born 1968) studied American history and sociology at University of California, San Diego. He is the founder of American Suburb X (www.americansuburbx.com) and These Americans (www.theseamericans.com), aggregating websites for essays on contemporary photography and historical photographic archives. A New American Picture was included in the annual New Photography exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2011.

Genres: Photography, Art

Hardcover

First published September 30, 2012

Reviews

[David Gallin-Parisi · Rating 5 out of 5]

My manager looked at this and said, "That's not what all of Midland, TX looks like". Which made me wonder what is actually contained in all Rickard's images? Definitely not an evenly distributed view of America. Instead there's a broken side of the country to see and street views that appear familiar from constant internet surfing. Black people running through streets, tense racial situations, bad neighborhoods, poverty, and bleached looking, glaring sunlight coursing through the land. All taken from Google Street View. Keep this book as a record of a time when all places where being documented. Dematerializes a roving landscape and creates a heavy, hefty portrait of a sad land.

[Davy · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a concept, the project earns an easy 5 stars -- so instantly iconic that its creation and publication were inevitable. But -- as a photographer who relies heavily on Street View and uses it many times a week for research and preparation -- A New American Picture does not realize the concept in a way that feels right to me. I'm deeply concerned about the racial emphasis and the power imbalance on display here -- Rickard being a white artist from the suburbs, and his subjects being largely anonymous, defenseless people of color in struggling communities. I also don't think the pictures are all that compelling in an aesthetic sense, which is a real disappointment considering some of the miraculous scenes I myself have discovered thanks to this technology. But these reservations all owe something to sour grapes. The grand scheme here might be obvious in some ways, but it is Rickard who made it happen and got the work out there. As such, he gets to set the rules. He and I may both be fascinated by the photographic potential of Street View, but specifically, he's after something different. His eye is drawn to other frames. Rickard has done something very important here, for photography, for the 21st century art world, for American cultural understanding. This was a necessary project. None of this is changed or diminished -- and may in fact be enriched -- by the fact that I find the work disappointing and discomfiting.

[Jason Machinski · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is brilliant a natural evolution of street photography in the digital age. David Campany’s opening essay and Erin O’Toole’s final thought provoking interview of Doug Rickard are great bookends to this version.

The images themselves are lonely, fuzzy and are more wastelands than hopeful. This is the natural extension of Frank’s The Americans.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those "why didn't I think of that" books, or more accurately, "I kind of thought of that but never got around to doing it" books. Doug Rickard travels the country via Google Street View and creates a virtual street photography from the massive library of automatically generated images. Rickard gravitates to images of more or less distressed locations that include people, which means he is drawing from a small percentage of available pictures. I'm impressed with the patience this must require.

As the book notes, his approach lets him show places he's never been and would probably never get to physically. (He says he works as though he's on a virtual road trip, presumably with a planned route.) Because the pictures are both automated and anonymous, there is a kind of intimacy that's different than what an in-person photographer is likely to achieve. I'm not completely sold on his preference for poverty, but his selection of images achieves compelling results. He actually photographs the scenes off a computer screen using a digital camera. That applies a distortion layer that adds some artfulness to the images, as well as, I imagine, some copyright protection.

A quick read and worth a look for anyone interested in street photography.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Based on Google Drive photographs, Rickard selects views from the 360˚ panoramic photographs from which he produces images reminiscent of Hopper's alienated Americans. Tracking areas usually avoided by newspapers and other mainstream media, Rickard's photographs depict countless boarded-up neighborhoods and businesses, children and adults surrounded by endless paths of broken cement and empty roads--snapshots of those left behind. Sad but beautiful photographs.

[Catherine Corman · Rating 4 out of 5]

how much of the important culture of the last century was premised either upon the chance encounter, the frisson of getting lost, or the desire to disappear into the world

-David Campany in A New American Picture