Doug Rickard - A New American Picture - 2012

Doug Rickard: A New American Picture is a striking and thought-provoking photobook that redefines contemporary street photography. Rather than capturing scenes firsthand, Rickard sourced his imagery from Google Street View, exploring overlooked and often marginalized areas across the United States. The result is a powerful visual narrative that reflects themes of isolation, socio-economic disparity, and the changing nature of photographic practice in the digital age. The images—grainy, fragmented, and sometimes haunting—offer a detached yet deeply evocative portrait of modern America.

This volume is considered a landmark in conceptual photography, challenging traditional ideas of authorship and observation. A must-have for collectors and enthusiasts of contemporary photography, it stands as both an artistic statement and a cultural document.


"" Doug Rickard's A New American Picture offers a startling and fresh perspective on American street photography. While at first glance the work looks reassuringly familiar and well within the traditional bounds of the genre, Rickard's methodology is anything but conventional. All of the images are appropriated from Google Street View; over a period of two years, Rickard took advantage of the technology platform's comprehensive image archive to virtually drive the unseen and overlooked roads of America--bleak places that are forgotten, economically devastated and abandoned. With an informed and careful eye, Rickard finds and decodes these previously photographed scenes of urban and rural decay. He rephotographs the machine-made images as they appear on his computer screen, framing and freeing them from their technological origins. As Geoff Dyer has commented on the work, "It was William Eggleston who coined the phrase 'photographing democratically, ' but Rickard has used Google's indiscriminate omniscience to radically extend this enterprise--technologically, politically and aesthetically.""