Doug Rickard

Doug Rickard (1968–2021) was an American artist, photographer and online publisher. His best-known work, A New American Picture, used Google Street View to reconsider documentary photography at a moment when pictures were increasingly encountered through databases and screens. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art identifies him as an American artist born in California in 1968 and holds six works from the series.

A documentary education

Rickard studied United States history and sociology at the University of California, San Diego. An interview-based account in Design Observer connects that education to his attention to slavery, segregation, civil rights and the socioeconomic conditions of neglected American communities. He also founded the photography websites American Suburb X and These Americans, combining contemporary essays with historical image archives.

That publishing activity is central to understanding his art. Rickard worked in an environment where images circulated through search tools, blogs, mapping platforms and online repositories. The internet was not merely a distribution channel but both source material and subject.

Making A New American Picture

Beginning in 2009, Rickard undertook a virtual road trip through Google Street View. He searched remotely through economically depressed urban neighbourhoods and small towns, choosing views from an automated archive rather than photographing on location. The New Yorker reports that he spent more than a thousand hours exploring these places and selected scenes that reflected both media-shaped ideas of cities and his growing familiarity with their visible conditions.

Rickard photographed selected views from his computer monitor. David Campany’s essay “In the Frame” explains the layered mechanism: Google’s vehicle-mounted cameras created panoramic records; mapping software turned them into a navigable environment; Rickard chose a rectangular view, then used a 35mm camera, tripod and slow shutter to rephotograph the screen. Geographic title codes, city names and dates became part of each image’s identity.

The method deliberately complicates authorship. Google’s automated system first recorded the streets; software organised them as data; people appeared without collaborating in a portrait session; and Rickard selected, framed, rephotographed and sequenced particular views. Blur, compression, elevated viewpoint and masked faces announce the platform’s mediation rather than pretending to be neutral photographic style.

That distance creates ethical tension. Street View can appear exhaustive, yet cameras, routes, stitching and privacy controls determine what can be seen. Rickard’s pictures resemble traditional street photography while denying the direct encounter usually associated with that genre. In his New Yorker interview, he acknowledged that the high camera and blurred faces could turn individuals into emblems of race and class. He also described the work as personal and subjective, “coloured” by his choices. The series therefore asks whether selection from a machine-made archive can function as social documentary, and what is lost when vulnerable communities are viewed remotely.

Two distinct editions

The project first appeared as a 2010 book made with White Press for the exhibition Anonymes at Le Bal in Paris. Campany states that this edition comprised 250 copies and sold out quickly. The later Aperture volume was not a simple reprint: the LensCulture/Aperture description says it added more than thirty images and identifies the hardcover as a 144-page publication with ISBN 978-1-59711-219-2.

The editions should therefore be catalogued separately. The 2010 book presents the project close to its first public emergence and in a smaller selection; the Aperture edition expanded its scale and audience. Their different edits matter because selection and sequence are precisely where Rickard’s authorship becomes most visible.

Reception and legacy

A New American Picture entered a major institutional context in New Photography 2011 at the Museum of Modern Art, a history recorded by Design Observer and the later book description. The project also appeared in Pier 24 Photography’s exhibition HERE. Pier 24 describes the series as a virtual journey along overlooked American roads and a portrait of socially disenfranchised communities.

SFMOMA’s collection places six works from the project in Detroit, Pahokee, New Orleans, Memphis, Helena-West Helena and Dallas. The locations form a dispersed map, but the pictures also describe the infrastructure through which those places became searchable and collectible. Campany notes a further archival paradox: Street View continually replaces earlier passes with newer images, so a system that appears limitless can erase its own visual past. Rickard’s rephotographs preserve selected moments from that changing database.

A New American Picture remains an important photobook of the screen era because it keeps both subjects visible at once. It depicts American streets marked by inequality, but it also depicts the technological and editorial conditions under which those streets are seen. Its documentary claim rests not on direct witness but on searching, choosing, reframing and sequencing—and on making that mediated process impossible to ignore.

Sources

• SFMOMA: Doug Rickard
• Design Observer: “A New American Picture”
• The New Yorker: “Doug Rickard’s Street View”
• David Campany: “In the Frame”
• LensCulture/Aperture book description
• Pier 24 Photography