By Doug Rickard
Located in Surfside, FL
Doug Rickard (American b.1968) Limited Edition Archival Pigment Print. Features the work titled; A New American Picture - Detroit. Signed on verso and numbered 4/5. Work: 26 in. x 41 1/2 in. Frame: 26 1/2 in. x 42 in.
Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture offers a startling and fresh perspective on American street photography. 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 deliberate eye, Rickard finds and decodes these previously photographed scenes of urban and rural decay.
A New American Picture depicts American street scenes, located using the internet platform Google Street View. Over a four-year period, Rickard took advantage of Google’s massive image archive to virtually explore the roads of America looking for forgotten, economically devastated, and largely abandoned places. After locating and composing scenes of urban and rural decay, Rickard re-photographed the images on his computer screen with a tripod- mounted camera, freeing the image from its technological origins and re-presenting them on a new documentary plane.
The low-resolution images that Rickard favors have a dissolved, painterly effect, and are occasionally populated with figures who acknowledge the camera, but whose faces are blurred, masking their identity. The photographs are thus imbued with an added surrealism and anonymity, which reinforces the isolation of the subjects and emphasizes the effects of an increasingly stratified American social structure.
Rickard’s work evokes a connection to the tradition of American street photography, with knowing references to Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Stephen Shore. He both follows and advances that tradition, with a documentary strategy that acknowledges an increasingly technological world—a world in which a camera mounted on a moving car can generate evidence of the people and places it is leaving behind. Collectively, these images present a photographic portrait of the socially disenfranchised and economically powerless, those living an inversion of the American Dream.Doug Rickard (born 1968) is an American artist and photographer. He uses technologies such as Google Street View and YouTube to find images, which he then photographs on his computer monitor. His photography has been published in books, exhibited in galleries and held in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Rickard is best known for his book A New American Picture (2010). He is founder and publisher of the website on contemporary photography, American Suburb X, and the website These Americans which publishes some of his collection of found photographs. This work features a black, African American man in the foreground walking in a bleak neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan.
Rickard was born in San Jose, California and brought up in Los Gatos in the San Francisco Bay Area. His father was a prominent pastor and many family members were preachers and missionaries, with a "very Reaganesque, patriotic view of America", a country "special and unique". Rickard studied United States history—slavery, civil rights—and sociology, at University of California, San Diego, and "lost his faith in this family vision. His adult view of America was a land not just of great achievement but also of massive injustice." At age 12 he witnessed his father having a secret extramarital affair, that years later in 1988 he confessed to his congregation. Rickard says this experience prompted him "to look for the fault lines in the American dream." He lives in Shingle Springs, near Sacramento, California.
For his series A New American Picture, Rickard "wanted to look at the state of the country in these areas where opportunity is non-existent and where everything is broken down", where "the American dream was shattered or impossible to achieve". It is said that this work comments on United States politics, poverty, racial equality and the socioeconomic climate, class; the use of technology in art, privacy, surveillance, and the large quantity of images on the web. He cites as influences the photobooks American Photographs (1938) by Walker Evans, The Americans (1958) by Robert Frank, Uncommon Places (1982) by Stephen Shore and American Night (2003) by Paul Graham.
The work was first exhibited as part of Anonymes: Unnamed American in Photography and Film, curated by David Campany and Diane Dufour at Le Bal, Paris, in 2010. To mark that occasion Rickard produced the first edition of the book, with the publisher White Press. Its first American museum show was at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
Select Publications:
Aperture Remix. New York: Aperture, 2012. A series of books made in homage to another Aperture publication, each in an edition of 5 copies. Rickard's was a response to Uncommon Places by Stephen Shore. The other publications were by Rinko Kawauchi, Vik Muniz, Alec Soth, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, Martin Parr, Viviane Sassen, Penelope Umbrico and James Welling. Produced in conjunction with the exhibition Aperture Remix.
A New American Picture. Nazraeli Press Six by Six, set 4 v. 5. Portland, OR: Nazraeli, 2012. Edition of 100 copies. The other volumes are by Robert and Kerstin Adams, Edward Burtynsky, Kenro Izu, Catherine Opie and Issei Suda.
Staking Claim: a California Invitational. San Francisco: Modernbook, 2013. Photographs by Rickard as well as Matthew Brandt, Susan Burnstine, Eric William Carroll, John Chiara, Chris Engman, Robbert Flick, Todd Hido, Siri Kaur, Mona Kuhn, Matt Lipps, David Maisel, Klea McKenna, Mark Ruwedel, Paul Schiek and Christina Seely. Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA.
Select Exhibitions:
Solo exhibition
2012: Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, October–November 2012.
Group Exhibitions
2010: Anonymes: L’Amérique sans nom: Photographie et Cinéma (Anonymous: Unnamed America in Photography and Film), Le Bal, Paris, September–December 2010. A thematic exhibition with works by Rickard as well as Jeff Wall, Walker Evans, Chauncey Hare, Lewis Baltz, Standish Lawder, Sharon Lockhart...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary William Claxton Figurative Photography
MaterialsPhotographic Paper, Archival Pigment
