Name Doug Rickard | Role Photographer | |
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Photographer spotlight doug rickard
Doug Rickard (1968) is a North American artist / photographer. He uses technologies such as Google Street View and YouTube to find images, which he then photographs on his monitor, to create series of work that have been published in books, exhibited in galleries and held in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Rickard is best known for his book A New American Picture (2010). He is founder and publisher of the website on contemporary photography, American Suburb X, and the website These Americans which publishes some of his collection of found photographs.
Contents
- Photographer spotlight doug rickard
- The photographic universe new frontiers with doug rickard and joshua chuang
- Life and work
- A New American Picture
- NA
- Publications by Rickard
- Publications with others
- Solo exhibitions
- Exhibitions with others
- Collections
- References
The photographic universe new frontiers with doug rickard and joshua chuang
Life and work
Rickard was born in San Jose, California and brought up in Los Gatos in the San Francisco Bay Area. His father was a prominent pastor and many family members were preachers and missionaries, with a "very Reaganesque, patriotic view of America", a country "special and unique". Rickard studied United States history — slavery, civil rights — and sociology, at University of California, San Diego, and "lost his faith in this family vision. His adult view of America was a land not just of great achievement but also of massive injustice." At age 12 he witnessed his father having a secret extramarital affair, that years later in 1988 he confessed to his congregation. Rickard says this experience prompted him "to look for the fault lines in the American dream."
He lives in Shingle Springs, near Sacramento, California.
Rickard is founder and publisher of the website on contemporary photography American Suburb X, which the British Journal of Photography considers "influential"; and the website These Americans, which publishes some of his collection of found photographs.
His most noteworthy books are A New American Picture (2010, 2012) and N.A. (2013, 2014).
A New American Picture
For his series A New American Picture, Rickard "wanted to look at the state of the country in these areas where opportunity is non-existent and where everything is broken down", where "the American dream was shattered or impossible to achieve". He searched web forums for key words to find such areas, then the Street View feature of the website Google Maps, which has mapped and photographed many streets in the US and elsewhere, to navigate their virtual streets looking for suitable scenes. He composed and photographed the images on his computer screen. It is said that this work comments on United States politics, poverty, racial equality and the socioeconomic climate, class; the use of technology in art, privacy, surveillance, and the large quantity of images on the web. Rickard says A New American Picture is about America and not about Google Street View.
He began work on A New American Picture in 2008, whilst working a day job in software sales at Cisco Systems. Rickard was at his computer nightly for over three years, taking 10,000–15,000 photographs, choosing about 80 for the series. He used a digital camera on a tripod to photograph a dedicated screen that mirrored a second screen that he used to navigate. He digitally manipulated the images to remove Google's watermark and crop extraneous information, resulting in a wide image from the wide screen computer monitor.
He cites as influences the photobooks American Photographs (1938) by Walker Evans, The Americans (1958) by Robert Frank, Uncommon Places (1982) by Stephen Shore and American Night (2003) by Paul Graham.
The work was first exhibited as part of Anonymes: Unnamed American in Photography and Film, curated by David Campany and Diane Dufour at Le Bal, Paris, in 2010. To mark that occasion Rickard produced the first edition of the book, with the publisher White Press. Its first American museum show was at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 2011.
Parr and Badger include the book in the third volume of their photobook history.
N.A.
N.A. is a body of work photographed from YouTube videos, which he began working with in 2008-9. The series portrays scenes of violence and crime in urban settings, often filmed on mobile devices. The title of the work is meant to be National Anthem, but is a deliberate reference and double meaning for 'N/A' (Not Applicable) as appears on forms, to signify that he considers many of the people depicted in the series are marginalized. "I came to the understanding pretty quickly that social media and the internet put into place a real predatory dynamic, where basically it motivated people to take video of other people to put up on YouTube to get shares, likes or comments."
Publications by Rickard
Publications with others
Solo exhibitions
Exhibitions with others
Collections
Rickard's work is held in the following permanent collections: