#78.840713, Durham, NC, 2009. Image © Doug Rickard. Doug Rickard’s book-length project, A New American Picture, shows the deprivation of the poorest US cities, and a novel way to approach documentary image making. A New American Picture paints a pretty bleak view. Portraying broken down streets and neglected buildings in the poorest cities of the world's richest economy, the images show small human figures seemingly overwhelmed by their surroundings, often peering suspiciously at the camera, as if it were an invader in a hostile land.

Taken in places such as Detroit, Cleveland and Camden in New Jersey, which has the unwelcome distinction of being the poorest city in the US, they show the dark underbelly of the American Dream, and the people for whom the land of opportunity has failed to provide. "These people are invisible [in the mainstream consciousness]," says Rickard. "Even in the US, other people don't realise how bad their conditions are."

The images have a distorted, otherworldly quality, owing partly to the unfamiliar places they depict, but also to their rough, pixellated quality. Their muddy colours, the lack of definition, strangely warped perspective and consistently high viewpoint give them a claustrophobic feel, even when they depict the long road ahead. And like any project set on the road in America, they inevitably recall the work of photographers such as Stephen Shore or Lee Friedlander – though Robert Frank might be more apt – and that's quite remarkable, because they were all taken from Google Street View. The US-based photographer, editor and founder of the influential website, American Suburb X, spent 10 months on a virtual road trip, touring through Google's images of his home country to put together a new take on street photography.

#33.665001, Atlanta, GA, 2009. Image © Doug Rickard.

"The project isn't about Google directly, or surveillance, but of course, that's part of it," says Rickard. "The images have a tense, disconcerting quality, and I think that's partly because of the way they were taken [using specially adapted cars with a tripod mast on the roof]. It is a kind of invasion of these people; there's a built-in lack of respect. The faces are supposed to be blurred by Google, but the logarithm isn't perfect, and I'd say you could see them 40 percent of the time. They could contact Google and request [that their image is blurred], but then you have to know that you're on Street View, and I'd expect that many of the people depicted here don't have access to a computer.

"But I also felt that these pictures couldn't have been taken any other way. Some of the scenes that are depicted, I couldn't have replicated in person. I wouldn't have the luxury of safety. I was able to do a virtual road trip from the comfort of my home." Rickard rephotographed all the images he collected rather than downloading tiny files from the internet, setting up a DSLR camera in front of his computer and shooting the screen in a darkened room. He deliberately opted not to show anything of the Street View site or telltale signs such as a cursor arrow or the computer desktop, drawing attention to the images themselves rather than where they came from. The caption of each image - #42.811339, Detroit, MI, 2009, for example - makes reference to the date, the location and its Street View URL, and the year in which each image was taken became important to Rickard, who noticed that Google was reshooting locations over the course of his project. "They're updating some of the earlier shots with higher-

resolution images, and I'm not sure that they're keeping a record of the shots they've replaced," he says. "I've got

an archive of how Street View depicted these places in 2009." He was more interested in the pixellated quality of the early shots than the "improved" versions made later, which he often zoomed into to break up. Each location is photographed as a 12-shot panoramic however, so he was able to move around it and "compose" a picture, and comments that it was like the world had stopped dead. Each time he found a scene he liked, he could choose whether to be in front, behind or to the side of each subject. He also considered using sequences of images but he found so many interesting subjects that he had to let them go, because he was only able to put just 69 images into the special edition book of the project, printed by Markus Schaden in Cologne in partnership with Le Bal in Paris, where the work was on show in December 2010. Rickard is now working on a slightly longer edit for a trade edition, which will be available next year. The Le Bal show was a group exhibition titled Anonymes, l'Amérique sans nom: photographie et cinéma, curated by former Magnum Photos director Diane Dufour and British photography academic David Campany, which put Rickard's images alongside names such as Walker Evans, Lewis Baltz, Jeff Wall, and Bruce Gilden. To Rickard, the project sits well among these masters, even if he didn't pull the trigger on location. "In each case, I had many different options and I chose what I thought was most significant, so it felt very akin to picture making," he says. "With digital imaging's mass proliferation of pictures, so much is about the editing - there are millions and millions of photographs in the world now, and increasingly what matters most is an ability to find a way through them."

Diane Smyth -- 22 February 2011

http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/feature/2013673/view-streets

http://artforum.com/?pn=picks&section=nyc#picks37017

GOOGLE STREET

THEY VE BEEN

FRAMEDGoogle Street View captures places — and people — at random.

Now photographers are turning candid images from this massive global archive into cutting-edge art.

By Bryan Appleyard

In 2007 Google launched Street View, an astonishing and sinister project to photograph every street, first, in America and then in the world. Cars with nine-lens, 360-degree cameras on periscope-like tubes sticking through their roofs crept

through our lives, snapping everything. It was an act of surveillance that would have glazed over the eyes of George Orwell, but, of course, with a few exceptions, we loved it.

Estate agents were ecstatic but photographers were intrigued. Street View

solved several snapper problems at once. First, they didn’t have to leave the house; second, they didn’t even need a camera; third, and most important, they didn’t have to confront their subjects in the street. In the golden age, snappers used to find all sorts of ways round this tricky problem — concealed cameras, lenses that shot round corners or just taking pictures

of people from behind. A surprising number of classic photographs are of people’s backs.

The American photographer Robert Frank toughed it out and, as a result, many of his pictures seem to be a record of a moment just before he got punched in the face. Henri Cartier-Bresson, the best of them all, simply employed speed, discretion and, when they

I’M APPROPRIATING GOOGLE. IF YOU LOOK AT THE HISTORY OF ART, THERE’S A LONG HISTORY OF APPROPRIATION

Detroit

Chicago

Dallas

New York

Detroit

Helena

59The Sunday Times Magazine 11.12.2011

GOOGLE STREETVIEW

The Montreal photographer Jon Rafman also produced images from Street View. For him, there is something “more real” about this technology. “The world captured by Google,” he said, “appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral,

unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project.”

Wolf and Rafman are both interested in the novelty and oddity of the Street View images. Wolf is especially influenced by the surveillance aspect and Rafman leaves Google’s navigation arrows on his pictures to make it clear where

they come from. In both cases, they seem to be commenting primarily on the system itself.

Doug Rickard, on the other hand, is not remotely interested in any of these things. He is interested in the American content and its haunting, visceral power. “I was interested in photographing America in the same context,

with the same poetry and power, that has been done in the past.”

It’s sad but true that, if you want to find the poorest area in any American city, look for the name Martin Luther King. The title of MLK boulevard, street or square is almost a guarantee that you are in the most deprived,

failed, charm. Garry Winogrand just smiled and laughed and it worked.

The problem of how to photograph people without them minding grew worse when people realised they had legal claims on the use of their image. The great tradition of street photography was threatened and then along came the internet and Google’s cars to mechanise the whole process.

When the German artist Michael Wolf started using Street View images, it was to the disgust of many professional photographers. But Wolf insisted this was real photography — he did not just use screen grabs, he actually snapped the computer screen with a camera — and real art. “It doesn’t belong to Google,” he said, “because I’m interpreting Google; I’m appropriating Google. If you look at the history of art, there’s a long history of appropriation.”

PHOTOGRAPHING AMERICA WITH THE SAME POETRY AND POWER AS HAS BEEN DONE IN THE PAST

61The Sunday Times Magazine 11.12.2011

GOOGLE STREETVIEW

crime-ridden part of town. “I use MLK to find the worst, most broken aspects of society,” says Rickard, “and he is this great beacon of hope and a hero for many Americans. There’s some kind of irony there, I felt sad about it.”

His other way of finding the urban badlands was the astonshing website city-data.com, on which the always mobile Americans discuss the best and worst areas to live. “Even with a little city like Waco, Texas, I could get local flavour and perception coming from third parties. I almost feel with any of the cities I could go there and know my way around.”

Rickard needed to find the the worst areas because he had decided to go on a road trip to photograph the tough underside of the USA, just like the great photographers of the golden age — Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn. Unfortunately, he had one huge disadvantage, he was stuck at home in California. But, thanks to Google, that was no longer a problem.

What we forget, now that millions of digital images are shot every minute of every day, is the shock of photography when it was new. It seemed to capture the real, unmediated by the artist’s hand. This is not quite true, of course; the photographer intervenes at every step from composing the image to making the print. Nevertheless, the magic of chemically capturing something like the real with the click of a shutter clung to the craft until the advent

I WANTED TO LOOK AT THE STATE OF THE COUNTRY IN THOSE AREAS WHERE EVERYTHING IS BROKEN DOWN

Fresno

of digital cameras and Photoshop manipulation.In America in the thirties and forties,

photographic realism produced a golden age. It was still an unformed, imperfectly known and, therefore, exotic country. Evans and Lange reported back from the heartland with devastating images that contrasted sharply with

the soaring affluence of the big cities. In the fifties, Robert Frank, a Swiss photographer, produced one of the great photographic books, The Americans, which showed a strange, uneasy land beyond the shining surburbs celebrated by Madison Avenue. Rickard emerges from that tradition and shares its

New Orleans

63The Sunday Times Magazine 11.12.2011

GOOGLE STREETVIEW

menacingly outside a close grocery store. In Dallas, a white dog beside a dead tree and a bleached-out yard glances round at Google’s passing car. Or — my favourite — in Fresno, a man wearing a white hat sits in a wheelchair in a dirt yard. Behind him there is a truck and a shabby ranch-style house. Everything seems to be fading to beige but for the sharp blue wheelie bins. The man is watching the car, he has nothing else to do.

These pictures are redemptions. There was always something intrusive and robotic about the Street View project, but there was also something philistine, a crude reduction of the photographic method and of the wonders of the golden age to a mechanised ordinariness. But, by a relentless editing process and a clear purpose, Rickard redeems photography from the morass of digital imagery by giving it real world substance. “The super-important thing, ultimately,” he says, “is that I was using Google but it’s not about Google, it’s about America.” s

political impulse. He is 43 and has been a photographer for 15 years. He founded and runs one of the most important photo websites, American Suburb X.

Brought up in Los Gatos in the San Francisco Bay area, Rickard was educated in the dream of that shining city on the hill.

“I grew up in a family of preachers and missionaries with this very Reaganesque, patriotic view of America that all of my family members had, of this beacon of light, a Christian nation, and one in which we had a level of manifest destiny and control of the world, so to speak.”

But, as the comedian George Carlin said, it’s called the American Dream because you’re asleep. At college, Rickard studied US history — slavery, civil rights — and lost his faith in this family vision. His adult view of America was a land not just of of great achievement but also of massive injustice

“When I started this project ... I really wanted to look at the state of the country in these areas where opportunity is non-existent and where everything is broken down. On the one hand these Google street pictures accentuate those feelings because the cameras

heighten that atmosphere of alienation, of invisible people, isolated, having no opportunity, everything decaying and broken. But on the other hand that is the reality…”

A virtual Walker Evans, he cruised the city streets on his computer. It was an eerie experience. “It was almost as if the world was frozen and I was navigating through this frozen world ... What was really driving me was the discovery when I started into this that visually these pictures could really work well on the order of something that Evans or Frank would produce — the flaws in the picture, the blurred faces, the almost apocalyptic type scenes of emptiness …”

When he found his shot, he photographed the screen. In total, he reckons he ended up with 10-15,000 shots which have been edited down to about 80 for his series A New American Picture, which is currently on exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The results are stunning and dusturbing, not least because the people in the shots don’t know or don’t care if they are being photographed. In New Orleans, four black kids stroll down a desolate street under a livid sky. In the Bronx, the blurred figure of a man in a suit hovers

Obis dolorisim quodiae ma veleseribus sum nonsento id min corest velestis qui ut oditatem excest, conecti quid quibus de

GOOGLE STREETVIEW

Art Review

Exploring Truth (and Fiction) Through a Camera Lens By KEN JOHNSON Published: October 13, 2011

In the 1980s photography mutated into a monster that threatened to swallow fine art altogether. In the hands of artists like Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Andreas Gursky and legions of copycats, photography parsed the day’s most urgent questions about representation, propaganda, truth and reality. But in the ensuing decades, the answers became increasingly routine, and today the beast that art photography was finds itself tired and toothless.

“Belladonna” by Viviane Sassen at the Museum of Modern Art.

If you are searching for signs of rejuvenation in “New Photography 2011,” an exhibition of six artists at the Museum of Modern Art, you will look in vain. But that is not to say it is an uninteresting presentation. Though none of the photographers included are doing anything revolutionary, each handles the medium in a distinctly different way, and that makes for a useful if not revelatory crossfire of ideas.

While not explicitly stated, a familiar theme does emerge from the collective pictures, which were selected by Dan Leers, a curatorial fellow in MoMA’s photography department. They all revolve around photography’s relationship to truth. Most intriguing conceptually in this vein are Doug Rickard’s strangely blurry and bleached, high-angle pictures of decrepit urban and suburban neighborhoods indentified with high poverty and crime rates. He made them without leaving his home in California by photographing Google Maps street views on his computer screen. Resembling stills from surveillance videos, the images speak to the kind of forensic truth that concerns law-enforcement personnel. Transformed by Mr. Rickard, they become a species of meta photography — pictures that invite thought about the roles played by photographs in real life.

Zhang Dali of Beijing presents groups of pictures documenting how journalistic photographs were altered by government publications under the Mao regime. In one published image, Mao and Deng Xiaoping shake hands in front of a red curtain, giving the impression of mythic ritual. In the original, more ordinary photograph, seen below, there is a scrum of people behind them. The alterations that Mr. Zhang reveals may seem innocuous, but the evocation

of Orwellian busywork constantly varnishing truth for the benefit of dictatorial dominion is chilling to contemplate.

The subjects of the photographs by Moyra Davey of New York are not apparently of great consequence. Most of the prints in a grid of 25 pinned to the wall, for example, show different bare-bulb ceiling lights. What is notable is that each is creased and has postage stamps and address labels attached. Ms. Davey folds up her pictures and sends them to friends via snail mail. Then she recovers them and presents them in the gallery with all the marks of their travel around the world. It is a curiously anachronistic project now that most photographs are sent digitally over the Internet. Perhaps it says something about the erosion of tangible reality by the virtual.

Unlike certain theorists of postmodernity, George Georgiou, who lives in Istanbul, does not question photography’s value as a witness to real world history. In old-fashioned, aesthetic terms, his glossy, color pictures of modern housing projects in Turkish cities under moody, gray skies are beautiful. An image of men in black uniforms standing guard on a neatly groomed lawn outside a tent emblazoned with Turkey’s star-and-crescent flag and a giant likeness of an erstwhile military leader, with a hot-air balloon floating away in the distant sky, has terrific cinematic resonance. It would help to be steeped in recent Turkish history to understand fully the issues related to modernization, nationalism and religion discussed in the text block on the wall of the exhibition. But the undercurrent of stress and foreboding animating Mr. Georgiou’s pictures reflects circumstances in many other places around the globe.

Deana Lawson, of New York, also goes the nonfiction way but more intimately. Her staged portraits of people in their homes have the kind of voyeuristic appeal that you see in the photography of Nan Goldin and Philip-Lorca diCorcia. The picture of a naked woman astride the lap of a shirtless man sitting in a chair while an infant dozes in a baby swing nearby affirms that few subjects of photography are more captivating than the private lives of ordinary people.

Viviane Sassen, who is Dutch, aims between fiction and nonfiction for emotional truth. Shooting in various African countries, she creates formally acute images of shadowy people in enigmatic situations. Someone pours orange soda from a bottle into a ragged hole in a sidewalk. A young woman in a floral-print skirt and flip-flops sprawls in sleep on an object covered by a sheet whose snowy whiteness intensifies the near blackness of her skin. Shot from above, a boy or girl floats face down in milky water as if drowned.

Ms. Sassen’s pictures are like clear glimpses emerging from otherwise murky dreams, but they also convey how strangely vivid and tantalizingly sad the world can seem to a mind and eye divested of the usual filters of perception.

“New Photography 2011” runs through Jan. 16 at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400, moma.org.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/arts/design/new-photography-2011-features-6-artists-at-moma-review.html?_r=1

Out ThereTuesday, September 27, 2011 | By Alexander Ho | Add a Comment

Art and the Outside World: MoMA’s ‘New Photography’There are any number of ways to make a picture, a notion that Dan Leers, curator of this year’s New Photography show at the Museum of Modern Art wanted to address in the exhibition, which opens Sept. 28.

““This year, my hope was to give an idea of the differ-ent ways photography is practiced today. I think all of the artists bring a unique background—where they are from, their training and their style,” Leers says. “That, in turn, makes each artist’s work unique and different than everything else.”

The annual New Photography show in New York City has launched the careers of many photographers while documenting major shifts in the practice, process and direction in which the medium is headed. Since its inception in 1985—minus a hiatus between 1998 to 2004 during renovations to the museum—each year’s exhibition is representative of the institution’s voice on prominent emerging work within the contemporary art photography world.

TThis year contains an international roster of six artists, with a diverse scope of practices. Zhang Dali sources original propaganda and print materials from Maoist-era China to analyze the meticulousness of the Chinese government’s censorship and practice of doctoring photographs. Moyra Davey integrates the postal service into her work, highlighting the rarity of analog practices in the digital age. Over the course of a decade, George Geor-giou photographed Turkey’s paradigm shifts in politics and social structure—a result of increased Westernization in the country. Deana Lawson‘s large-scale environmental portraits explore the notions of intimacy, sexuality and comcommunity among African-Americans. Doug Rickard uses screenshots from Google street view to not only high-light the proliferation of photography on the web, but to raise discussion about poverty, race-equity and personal privacy. Rounding out the group is Viviane Sassen, who was born in Amsterdam but spent her childhood years in Kenya. Sassen explores her feelings of displacement and a lack of national identity in a series of surreal photo-graphs of anonymous subjects.

Unlike shows in the past few years, this selected group of artists all address issues that reach beyond the art world and speak to a larger audience. “The engagement [outside of the art world] was something I was going for,” says Leers. “Having there be a connection between the artist and viewer was important. My hope is that the viewer, regardless of whether they can specifically relate to the ideas or moments, can understand the photographer’s connection with the work and therefore become interested.”

New Photography 2011 opens Wednesday, Sept. 28 and is on view until Jan. 16, 2012at MoMA in New York City.

http://lightbox.time.com/2011/09/27/art-and-the-outside-world-momas-new-photography/#1

#29.942566, New Orleans, LA., 2008, 2009, from Doug Rickard's series, A New American Picture

(Photo credit: Doug Rickard, courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York and Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco)

In a strikingly postmodern departure from the gritty tradition of street photography (where photographers

actually go out in the streets to photograph), Doug Rickard’s “A New American Picture” monograph consists

of photos of images taken by the Google Street View car. Unable to personally explore the back streets and

forgotten alleys of American cities, Rickard settled on a virtual exploration, capturing the most striking images

with a tripod aimed at his computer screen.

Rickard’s process — culling the images from the depths of the internet and then liberating them from the ether

with his camera — results in blurry depictions of boarded-up houses, abandoned lots, and desolate cityscapes

populated by anonymous subjects with pixelated faces. While removed from his subjects, and not responsible

for the images’ existence, Rickard’s ability to recognize the decisive moment vital to street photography makes

this collection an incredible portrait of American’s forgotten streets. (Other artists who have mined Google

Street View for photographic material include Jon Rafman, whose “Nine Eyes of Google Street View” made

our list of 100 iconic artworks since 2007.)

A limited-edition monograph of “A New American Picture” was released in 2010, and selected images from the

book have been included in exhibitions in Europe and America. In September 2012, aperture published a

second edition with 40 new images. It is available at Aperture Foundation, where Rickard will be signing

copies on October 16, and Yossi Milo Gallery, where he will be on October 18 signing books and celebrating

his first solo show in New York City.

—Sara Roffino

http://blogs.artinfo.com/artintheair/2012/10/05/doug-rickards-a-new-american-picture-at-aperture-and-yossi-milo/

Doug Rickard prowled the neglected, unglamorous wilds of YouTube to compile the images in his new book, “N.A.,” out now from Verlag Kettler. (He’s previously created work made by appropriating Google Street View shots.) In a recent interview with the photographer conducted via email, we discussed constructing narrative from randomness, and how YouTube can be seen as a conceptual “chorus of voices.” How would you situate your use of both YouTube stills and Google Street View images within the larger discussion about appropriation art? Well, we’ve entered what could almost be referred to as the “appropriation era” or perhaps “the Age of the Remix.” Access to the Internet is relentlessly marching across the global population, and (almost) everyone will have a computer in their hand at all times, at some point. The result is a massive volume of content that is then exponentially and endlessly growing. Richard Prince had his magazines and tear sheets to work from — artists now have a billion images, in addition to those magazines. Everything on the net is simply “material.” If you look at Tumblr, Instagram, and most of the social media apps, appropriation is becoming a de facto mode of expression, as people remix visual images over and over. Art is reflecting this, and it should. The challenge for artists is then to find a voice within an ocean of endless appropriation possibilities. Do you feel a kinship with artists also turning to similar technologies and images, like Jon Rafman? There is a kinship with other artists who are turning to the Internet as a frontier, but we come from many different places and points of view that often radically depart from each other. Rafman’s work often looks at the Internet as a virtual reality, with results that flow toward the surreal. The Street View work that I did in “A New American Picture” was so visually and thematically tied to American street photography (Evans, Shore, Eggleston, etc.) and the American (racial, economic, etc.) experience. It was wild to come away with such a different result from someone like Rafman, and still using the same “platform.” How important is narrative flow to “N.A.” — have you constructed the book in a linear sense, asking the viewer to connect (unconnected) images together into a type of story? Narrative seems to accompany photography like a marriage partner, at least historically. In “N.A.,” I wanted to break this down a bit and leave a story in place that suggested and implied, versus one being “told” and “given.” I was looking at YouTube as a chorus of voices, cultural “music” in a way that is detailed and revelatory but often fragmented and built on snippets and incomplete sentences. The amateur video footage that is uploaded are bits and bytes of peoples’ experiences, rather than a complete picture. My work needed to function in the same way. Narrative in “N.A.” seemed right in a looser form, with the visual elements as much felt as they were intellectually understood. The power and mystery in the imagery could speak, while the situations happening were less than totally defined. I’m really connecting dots from many separate parts, fragments of frozen time, tiny slivers plucked from what are already snippets. At the same time, the viewer should find what they think are stories: the subjects’, their own, and mine. How did you go about sourcing these images from YouTube? Were you relying on certain search terms? Or was the process more random — exploring the massive, uncurated archive and seeing what becomes interesting? Over a period of a few years I explored the platform almost daily. I actually started it back in 2009 but then I decided to do the Street View project first (2009-2012). I then picked it back up in 2011-2013, so the two projects overlapped. I explored YouTube using keywords that organically grew and expanded over time, starting wide at first but narrowing as I found the silos that interested me. At first, I simply used the names of all of the same cities and towns that I explored for “A New American Picture” (Detroit, New Orleans, Memphis, Buffalo, etc.) but then I started to dive in to topics that seemed to extend out from these places — topics that often accompany a failure of the

American (socio-economic) Dream. The topics are perhaps dealing with the violence, isolation, anger, frustration, expression that is coming from American groups and individuals that are facing a deck that is stacked against them. These topics also came from the motives for people who were uploading to the platform. Most often this stemmed from a desire to get attention in the form of likes, views, shares, and comments. Because of this, a real vicious side to YouTube emerged. People would upload content that was predatory and callous, as that often would evoke attention. So I began using keyword searches like “hood fights,” “police brutality,” “passed out girl,” “hood tour,” “beating,” or “gang stalking.” I wanted content that was coming from amateurs, not commercial videos. I wanted to get past commerce and right into the hand of Americans. I set up two large monitors with duplicate views. One had a tripod-mounted camera pointed at it. I had a shutter release to click in my left hand, and a mouse in my right hand, to navigate. I would explore the snippets, in the dark, pausing as I watched the scenes unfolding, searching for my pictures. I would then download the video off the net and into my archives. What’s one of the craziest or most disturbing clips you’ve witnessed on the site (whether or not you ended up using it for your own work)? I was watching these keyword searches daily and I would explore and grab the videos, often before YouTube would delete them for violation of terms. I saw a lot of things that I don’t really want to describe. This being said, the bulk of material would stay on the site and is still there now. YouTube is quite flexible with violent and predatory content and also, it is difficult for them to police. There’s a certain darkly sinister vibe to the images in “N.A.” — an undercurrent of unease and violence at times. What sort of aesthetic or mood were you hoping to impart by assembling these specific appropriated images together? I used the darkness often, the literal darkness. It provided an aesthetic that was beautiful in spite of a metaphorically dark take on America. Art functions best when the aesthetic is corralled, commanded, and authored, rather than rambling and unspecific. For me, aesthetic and concept are equal partners. I need both. It also made sense to work from a specific aesthetic so as to visually pull the threads together and make it feel distinct: nighttime darkness or dusk, shadows and muted shapes, vibrant color. It took probably six months to find this aesthetic. The images needed to feel cohesive, coming from the same author. I got to the point where I could tell from the thumbnail of the video alone whether this would be possible. The mood that you feel is both manipulated and real. Often the scenes did explode with violence, and you are seeing the preface to it. In other situations there may have been howling, laughter, enjoyment, but the darkness shifts the mood to one of menace. Or perhaps the enjoyment and laughter was at the expense of another person. There is a rage in America that is palpable; we saw it in Ferguson, and we are seeing it play out in the media as police brutality and injustice are prominently in the spotlight. “N.A.” is reflecting and carrying this sentiment. In addition to the subject matter and aesthetic of darkness, I wanted the viewer to feel like a “fly on the wall” — to feel like they are somewhere that maybe they shouldn’t be. After all, we are all now voyeurs of each other and of society at large. We are looking through the eyes of another, constantly — on Instagram, on Twitter, on Google, on YouTube, and then with the NSA and other governments doing it to all of us. We are a “voyeur society,” and it’s never going away. There is a camera in every hand. We are all surveillance machines. Logically we will move to some sort of capture at the eye level (Google Glass is just the beginning of this concept). “N.A.” deals with this directly. In this case, I hijacked the view of others and presented it to you. I was there watching what was happening and the subjects didn’t know it. Their lens was my lens. But we are all doing it, and it should make you squirm. In general, how would you say that these sorts of largely unfiltered, democratic platforms — YouTube, Instagram, and so on — have changed the role or status of contemporary artists? These platforms are cultural, economic, and human-behavior disruptors. With that disruption, and in the disruption, we’re all giving something up, and gaining something else. For example, our attention spans (for those immersed in technology) are getting erased, but we now have the amazing power of “skimming the top” and cherry picking what we want. We don’t have to hunt for it — Google does that for us. Contemporary artists and the art world itself are being impacted by this disruption, for better and for worse. The screen and the Internet as a medium is unlike anything before it. It’s two-way versus one-way — as TV, magazines, and newspapers are — and because of that everyone can now have a (unequal) voice. This is a big shift. No one person can then control the cultural hierarchies as easily. Photography as a medium is perhaps particularly impacted by this shift as it is so tightly tied to technology. The very “special” image or photograph will carry less and less heft and meaning (and perhaps collectability) as people endlessly consume images with the swipe of their finger.

http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1071247/doug-rickard-samples-youtubes-chorus

A New American Picture: Doug Rickard and Street Photography in the Age of Google

#40.805716, Bronx, NY. 2009, 2011

The titles of the pictures were carefully considered and contain three pieces of information. The first number is a Google code that contains geographical (possibly GPS) coordinates, but has been modified by Rickard so as to not disclose the exact Street View location. Second, is the name of the city and state. Lastly are two dates. The first date refers to the year the photograph was taken by Google Street View, the second date refers to the year that Doug Rickard made his picture. The overall title is meant to resemble an American street address and tie into location without specificity. “What's in store for me in the direction I don't take?” — Jack Kerouac Doug Rickard, the son of a retired preacher, grew up learning about America from a decidedly slanted point of view. His father, a Christian conservative who led a mega-Church in the 80’s, was highly patriotic and proudly part of the “Moral Majority.” He taught his children that America was “the exception to the rest of the world” — that God had anointed our country as “special and unique.” This patriotic but misleading Reagan-era dogma may have been inspiring to most in the congregation, but young Doug, very much a rebel in his youth, had nagging doubts. In spite of his troubled youth, Doug would graduate from high school. He then took a break of five years before attending college. In retrospect he sees the break as crucial and “one of the best things to occur,” as he could not have been “ready to learn” until that older age. It was through his studies in history and sociology at the University of California, San Diego (History major, graduating in 1994) that Rickard began to compare the greatness of our country with an unsettling truth: that America had a very dark past — a key being the enslavement of Africans to be a workforce for the American South. Deeper studies into the periods of segregation, “Jim Crow” laws, and the Civil Rights movement would impact him greatly.

Rickard, an artist as a child (his teachers would exclaim to his parents that he would surely “do something special” with his artistic talent), discovered photography in adulthood — a discovery that would become an obsession. He began to codify this obsession in early 2008, when he created the now highly popular websites American Suburb X and These Americans. These sites, largely extensions of his personal journey, obsessions and self-education, are now highly regarded by photography aficionados, educators and historians for their high quality of writing and massive visual archives. ASX receives approximately 80,000 unique visitors a month and is “Liked” by 38,000 Facebook “fans.” These Americans is known in part for being a view into Rickard’s personal found-image archive. With such a strong interest in history, Rickard was used to looking at the past. But for these new web projects he turned his attention to the present, exploring the statistics, demographics and socio-economics of contemporary America’s neglected communities. While doing this he began to experiment with ordinary and static images resulting from keyword searches on Google. But by the next year — in mid-2009 — he discovered Google Street View. In a telephone interview that lasted well over an hour, the 43-year-old-old Rickard told me that the idea for his recent photographic work emerged as a sort of “epiphany” within 24 hours of using Street View. The project was, he explained, the result of a sort of “perfect storm,” in that it combined his love of photography and its history with his background in American history and sociology. Also, practicality was a component in the form of his inability to travel America, a restriction of the scenarios in real life — a demanding day job and a young family. According to Rickard, this epiphany fused immediately into a crystal-clear idea: He would use Street View as his camera and, working from a room in his home, travel the roads of neglected American cities and neighborhoods in a 21st-century “road trip.” This single idea would utterly consume his life for close to two years, resulting in the important body of work “A New American Picture,” a selection of which hangs today in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. When Google launched Street View in 2007, it was the company’s intent to map and document every street in the United States. Cars were dispatched into every city to drive every street and back road, using nine directional cameras mounted on the roofs of special cars. These cameras give us 360° movable views at a height of about 8.2 feet. There are also GPS units for positioning and three laser-range scanners designed for measuring up to 50 meters 180° in the front of the vehicle. Rickard analyzed tens or hundreds of thousands of Street Views in his search for perfect pictures, something he describes as containing an “apocalyptic-like brokenness.” Indeed, the height of the camera at 8.2 feet, while creating an aesthetic cohesion and uniformity of vision, adds a distinct feeling of “alienation” that Rickard employs. Unlike the making of street photos in the traditional sense, with Street View there is an oblivious-ness to the camera as it goes about its job with no feeling or emotion. In spite of this anonymity of machine, his images are — perhaps surprisingly — layered with empathy. Rickard has amassed several terabytes of Street View images — nearly 15,000 shots captured, labeled, and stored. From that massive stash, he selected only about 80 images for “A New American Picture,” of which a selection is on view at MoMA. To give you an idea of the voracity of Rickard’s Street View search, he has virtually explored almost every neighborhood in the “broken” portions of Atlanta, New Orleans, Jersey City, Durham, Houston, Watts (in Los Angeles) and Camden. He has also explored, inch by inch, the smaller towns of America with names like Lovington, Waco, Artesia, Dothan and Macon. What he looks for are images that carry what he calls a certain “poetry” of subject matter, color, and story — a story described in part by him as “the inverse of the American Dream.” And if the image isn’t “perfect” according to the elements of Rickard’s demands, it’s a no-go. Everything in the image has to be composed, via the camera motion of Street View, to his very subjective, personal, and exacting standards.

Doug Rickard is a modern-day photographer not unlike those who went before him. His imagery can be compared to the banal and mysterious cityscapes of painter Edward Hopper, or the great documentary photographers like Ben Shahn, Robert Frank and Walker Evans, all of whom shone a light on the shadows and made known the “invisible” — the disenfranchised and forgotten communities of America. Just as WPA photographers like Dorothea Lange combed America to document the great American Depression, so has Doug Rickard with his new camera: Google Street View.

John Foster - January 1, 2012

http://observatory.designobserver.com/feature/a-new-american-picture-doug-rickard-and-street-photography-in-the-age-

of-google/32028/

November 9, 2012

Doug Rickard’s Street View Posted by Rachelle Klapheke

#39.177833, Baltimore, MD (2008), 2011

#32.700542, Dallas, TX (2009), 2010

#83.016417, Detroit, MI (2009), 2010

Early in 2009, the photographer Doug Rickard, the artist behind “American Suburb X” and “These Americans,”

became immersed in the online world of Google Street View. His virtual travels led him to some of the most

economically depressed areas of the country. “All of us have a ‘Detroit’ in our minds, or a ‘Dallas’ or a ‘Fresno,’

even if we have not travelled there,” Rickard told me. “I think that I chose pictures that partially represented

those biases and media-affected notions of place, and yet I explored immensely these American places, a

thousand hours or more, gaining an understanding of the conditions.”

In Google Street View, the absence of an engaged eye through which to interpret its images can lend them an eerie quality. “The height gives a feeling of looking down on the scene, and this affects the emotional read and subtext of the work,” Rickard said. “Also, Google’s blurring of the faces and the lo-fi nature of the images changed the individuals into symbols or emblems and representative of larger notions, such as race and class, instead of personal stories that would have wanted to emerge with recognition.” His appropriation of these images, he said, is what makes them a valid form of photography. “I wanted to represent the inverse of the American Dream, and yet the work is also very personal and subjective, colored by my choices and selection,” he said. “The very definition of photography is expanding. Personally, I am ecstatic about it, and I see a massive frontier that is unfolding to feed and fuel my obsessions.”

All photographs courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, where Rickard’s “A New American Picture” is on view through November 24th.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2012/11/doug-rickards-street-view.html#slide_ss_0=1

The Google Riis

BY ROBERT SHUSTER

NOVEMBER 7, 2012

Doug Rickard: 'A New American Picture'

The primary photographer behind the portraits of

urban desolation in this oddly affecting show is a

robot—the indifferent, computer-controlled

spherical camera mounted on Google's Street View

cars. Although designed to document buildings and

landmarks for navigational purposes, the eyeball-

like machines are also taking snapshots of life at

each location. Google blurs faces and license plates

but doesn't typically erase anything (unless by request), and so the amassed collection of images—now covering 3,000

cities worldwide—has become a fascinating database that describes, by happenstance, the human condition.

Spend enough time traveling through the virtual spaces and you'll find—as many bloggers and artists have—dozens of

startling moments. In separate efforts, Michael Wolf and Jon Rafman have assembled extensive online galleries of fires,

mishaps, comical oddities, apparent violence, and at least one death. For his part in this treasure hunt, Doug Rickard

has taken a more considered approach, extracting a series of scenes that reveal the forsaken edges of U.S. cities. Reshot

without the Google stamps and then enlarged, the images hang on the wall as traditional photographs. Their grainy

textures and muted palettes, recalling Kodachrome prints from the 1970s (in particular, the streetwise work of Helen

Levitt), further distance the original context.

In fact, it's a testament to Rickard's eye for detail and talent for cropping that the compositions all appear intentional,

with neatly arranged colors, dramatic angles, and poignant juxtapositions. In New Orleans, four young men stride

down an abandoned block under a sky of shattered gray clouds, an ominous expanse that matches the landscape of

decaying concrete. In Atlanta, a boy bikes past an oppressive brown background of autumn trees and boarded-up

homes, as if in flight from such hints of death. For these and other works, Rickard emphasizes vanishing points to

deepen your sense of bleakness.

But beneath all this, there runs a strong undercurrent of irony. An unfeeling contraption designed by a multibillion-

dollar company takes drive-by pictures of poverty as part of a project advertised to help us "plan a summer vacation"—

pictures that are then turned into high art. A moment captured in Baltimore exemplifies that divide: At a deserted

intersection, in an hour of long shadows, two anonymous children gape outward, seeing what must have appeared to

them like a visitor from another planet. The elevated viewpoint of Google's eight-foot-tall camera, evident in every shot

but particularly noticeable in this one, is imperious. Yossi Milo Gallery, 245 Tenth Avenue, 212-414-0370, yossimilo.com. Through November 24.

http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/the-google-riis-7175714