A New American Picture: Doug Rickard's Google Street View road-trip
Doug Rickard
From the series A New American Picture
#40.805716, New York City, NY. 2009. 2011
Archival Pigment Print
© Doug Rickard, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
Posted: Friday, 17 May 2013 at 12:49pm
https://web.archive.org/web/20130608063321/http://www.abc.net.au/arts/blog/2013-head-on-festival/doug-rickard-a-new-american-picture/default.htm
In 2009, American photographer Doug Rickard was looking for a way to explore the United States but wasn't at a point in his life where he could just head off on a road trip.
And so it was that the studio-bound California-based photographer happened upon the artistic potential of Google's Street View tool. First launched in 2007, the Google Street View project set out to photograph the streets of every city and town in America.
"I immediately started to dive heavily into it. I saw right away the potential of the aesthetic in the images and the incredibly deep access that I was given (to every street in America) through it," Rickard said in an interview with ABC Arts.
"The same day I was using my mobile phone and photographing the screen," he adds.
For over three years Rickard used Google Street View to explore the cities and towns once synonymous with large scale manufacturing and wide-spread employment; Detroit, Baltimore, Houston, Memphis, Atlanta, New Orleans, Camden New Jersey, Buffalo New York.
This virtual journey sent Rickard along the same path as some of America's greatest 20th century social documentary photographers, like Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn and Walker Evans, who while employed by the Farm Security Administration during the 1930s and '40s photographed depression-era America, and also helped to raise the documentary potential of the photographic medium.
Rickard was also influenced by the work of American street photographers like Paul Graham, Robert Franks, Anthony Hernandez and Stephen Shore. "I knew that this would have a connection to the FSA work and the tradition of American street photography and that it would have it it many layers of conversation and questions that were complex - photographic history, street photography, race, power, class, technology, surveillance, privacy, etc."
Rickard's A New American Picture series started out as a quest to see the places that had helped create the mythology of the American dream, the land of opportunity.
The decay that has beset much of America's once strong manufacturing sector is no secret, images of abandoned factories, warehouses and derelict homes in America's 'rust-belt' have been used in news reports for many years. But the level of poverty and hardship the Google Street View cameras captured still surprised him, "Within a few weeks of testing prints (from the screen) and determining that the images held power, I decide what I would do with it - an American view of the brokenness of our nation, the inverted American Dream," he says.
But Rickard wasn't after decayed landmarks, but images of people and communities that for most part are hidden from view. Specifically, he was looking for a combination of elements, "colour that was distinct, a palette that contained beauty and power, American colour, light and shadow that was special, the timing of the human participants and their location in the scenes, the implications of their bodies and gestures, and then the particular subtext that exudes from the images - emptiness, isolation, outside the mainstream, powerless, non-participation in American economic power, frailty, anger, marginalization, anonymity - the last being very important."
Google Street View's digitally stitched 360 degree views gave Rickard the freedom to compose his shots much like he was in the field. Once composed, he would photograph his compositions on his computer screen.
Aesthetically he favoured the images captured by the low resolution cameras employed in the first iteration of Street View. Re-photographed these images have a softness reminiscent of pre-digital photography. While other qualities of the Google Street View platform, such as elevated camera positions, the distorted geometry and the blurred faces, much like security camera footage, add a sense of authenticity and truth about the people and places that he has depicted.
But much like those who pioneered the documentary photography tradition, Rickard is well aware of the distortion inherent in the medium.
"I really liked how [Walker] Evans approached documentary [photography] and called it near-documentary or lyrical-documentary, he was well aware of the fact that you're layering in elements here that will manipulate the viewer," said Rickard in a 2012 interview with Pier 24 Photography.
"I'm simply shining a point of view, a spotlight, on specific parts of our country need to be seen," he adds.
Doug Rickard
From the series A New American Picture
#82.948842, Detroit, MI (2009), 2010
Archival Pigment Print
© Doug Rickard, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
Doug Rickard
From the series A New American Picture
#29.942566, New Orleans, LA (2008), 2009
Archival Pigment Print
© Doug Rickard, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
Doug Rickard
From the series A New American Picture
#96.749058, Dallas, TX (2008), 2010
Archival Pigment Print
© Doug Rickard, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
Doug Rickard's A New American Picture is on show alongside the work the late Tim Heatherington's Afghanistan from 22 May to 22 June at Sydney's Stills Gallery, 36 Gosbell St, Paddington, in association with Yossi Milo Gallery New York and the Head On Photo Festival.