Doug Rickard

Doug Rickard is a Google Street View photographer and many people don’t quite class it as art/photography. His body of work is called A New American Picture, his process sounds like he goes on Google Maps, where you can zoom so far in you can see all the streets and navigate your way like that, and screenshots places and uses it as his own work even though a car would take all the photos to be put on Google, and he just has just sit at his computer and takes a photo of the screen with a digital camera. Rickard is more of a curator than a photographer I think because he himself isn’t taking the original photographs as he gets them from the internet and he’s created a series of photographs around America that have been taken from a camera attached to a car.

He photo-shops the Google watermark out and crops them in a panoramic format and even though he doesn’t capture the original image, the streets aren’t just any old street with no meaning behind them, he has took pictures of the areas in America where unemployment is high and educational opportunities are few and also comments on poverty and racial equity in the United States, the bounty of images on the web, and issues of personal privacy.

These are a few pictures from the book A New American Picture.