A New American Picture (Signed)

Doug Rickard
A New American Picture (Signed)

Photographs: Doug Rickard

Publisher: White Press

92 pages

Year: 2010

Comments: Blue hardcover. 230 x 335 mm. First edition, 2010. Text in English, Limited edition of 250 signed and numbered copies. Included in Martin Parr & Gerry Badger, The Photobook, vol. III, p.310. Copy in very good condition.

Doug Rickard's A New American Picture offers a startling and fresh perspective on American street photography. While on first glance the work looks reassuringly familiar and well within the traditional bounds of the genre, his 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 deliberate 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.”It was named a best book of 2010 by photo-eye magazine.