oakvibe.pages.dev

Doug rickard photographer biography

    •

Doug Rickard’s New American Pictures

D. Rickard - #39.177833, Baltimore, MD. 2008, 2011

When you first look at those photos come diretly in mind the works of two of the most important american photographers: Robert Frank and Stephen Shore. Frank, for the documentary part, the vacuity of an American dream, and Shore for the aesthetic, with the same cars, buildings and colors we see in his series from the 70s. But with a closer look you’ll notice that we are confronted with an other kind of photographs, a bit out of focus or even “pixelised”. There are indeed digitale and made with an unconventional camera: the one from googlemaps.

Namely: google street view. For his serie called “New American Pictures”, the american Doug Rickard navigated the most destitute areas of the country with the 360°street-level imagery tool from google. Chicago’s ghettos, Detroit’s neglected neighborhoods, untended streets in the Bronx… when Robert Frank’s pictures communicated the segregation and aggression in the american society in the

    •

Likes Will Tear Us Apart

American photographer Doug Rickard (1968) is pulling apart the American Dream through the collective images of a technological society. Working with extracts from Google Street View for his project A New American Picture, and with YouTube for his work N.A., Rickard trawls through the vast stores of publically available internet imagery looking at urban areas, in particular those expressing the effects of marginalised groups and societal injustice. On the occasion of his exhibition of N.A. at Little Big Man Gallery in Los Angeles, Rickard speaks with GUP about the predatory nature of social media platforms, the future of photography and his love/hate relationship with America.

Your latest work using stills and videos pulled from YouTube presents some seriously ominous imagery. What kind of material were you watching?

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 comm

    •
PHOTOGRAPHY MONOGRAPHS

Doug Rickard: N.A.

Published by Verlag Kettler/D.A.P..
Text by Z. Redman. Poem by Ann Garlid.

For the last three years, photographer Doug Rickard has been immersed in YouTube videos uploaded by Americans from their cellphones. These videos, documenting a dizzying array of activities, from seemingly criminal or semilegal acts to comic antics, allowed Rickard to witness scenarios he otherwise would never have seen-"right from the hands and eyes of other people," he writes, "hijacking their own device to give me very special views and intimate situations." Reveling in this vicariousness, he found that he could be "riding in a car full of teens through Detroit at night with a camera phone hanging out the window … or witnessing, from their own lens, someone who is paying a drug addict to dance for a dollar to later get 'View,' 'Comments' and 'Likes' on YouTube." Rickard then selected and appropriated specific images by pausing the footage and advancing through it second by second. The resulting volume expands on his previous and critically lauded monograp

Copyright ©oakvibe.pages.dev 2025