Doug Rickard (photographer)

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.

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

• A New American Picture.
  • Cologne: White Press / Schaden, 2010. Edition of 250 copies. Includes 69 photographs.
  • Larger format, expanded edition. New York: Aperture; Berlin: Koenig, 2012. ISBN 978-1-59711-219-2. With an introductory essay by David Campany, "In the Frame", and a transcript of a conversation between Rickard and Erin O’Toole. Includes 79 photographs.
• Tom. Los Angeles: Little Big Man, 2013. Edition of 300 copies.
• All Eyes on me. One Picture Book 86. Portland, OR: Nazraeli Press, 2014. ISBN 9781590054154. Edition of 500 copies.
• Patriot Act. London: Wild Life Press, 2014. OCLC 911411734.
• N.A.
  • Cologne: White Press, 2013. Edition of 200 copies.
  • Dortmund: Kettler; New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2014. ISBN 978-1938922626. Text by Zaha Redman. Poem by Ann Garlid. English-language version.
  • Dortmund: Kettler; New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2014. ISBN 978-3-86206-345-1. Text by Zaha Redman. Poem by Ann Garlid. German-language version.

Publications with others

• Aperture Remix. New York: Aperture, 2012. A series of books made in homage to another Aperture publication, each in an edition of 5 copies. Rickard's was a response to Uncommon Places by Stephen Shore. The other publications were by Rinko Kawauchi, Vik Muniz, Alec Soth, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, Martin Parr, Viviane Sassen, Penelope Umbrico and James Welling. Produced in conjunction with the exhibition Aperture Remix.
• A New American Picture. Nazraeli Press Six by Six, set 4 v. 5. Portland, OR: Nazraeli, 2012. ISBN 9781590053607. Edition of 100 copies. The other volumes are by Robert and Kerstin Adams, Edward Burtynsky, Kenro Izu, Catherine Opie and Issei Suda.
• Staking Claim: a California Invitational. San Francisco: Modernbook, 2013. OCLC 867793604. With a foreword by Deborah Klochko and essays by Chantel Paul ("Garden State") and Colin Westerbeck ("All together now! Themes and Shared Concerns in Staking Claim: a California Invitational"). Photographs by Rickard as well as Matthew Brandt, Susan Burnstine, Eric William Carroll, John Chiara, Chris Engman, Robbert Flick, Todd Hido, Siri Kaur, Mona Kuhn, Matt Lipps, David Maisel, Klea McKenna, Mark Ruwedel, Paul Schiek and Christina Seely. Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA.
• The World Atlas of Street Photography. New Haven and London: Yale University: 2014, ISBN 978-0-300-20716-3. Edited by Jackie Higgins. With a foreword by Max Kozloff.

Solo exhibitions

• 2012: Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, October–November 2012.

Exhibitions with others

• 2010: Anonymes: L’Amérique sans nom: Photographie et Cinéma (Anonymous: Unnamed America in Photography and Film), Le Bal, Paris, September–December 2010. A thematic exhibition with works by Rickard as well as Jeff Wall, Walker Evans, Chauncey Hare, Lewis Baltz, Standish Lawder, Sharon Lockhart, Anthony Hernandez, Arianna Arcara & Luca Santese, and Bruce Gilden. Curated by Diane Dufour and David Campany.
• 2011/2012: New Photography 2011, Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 2011 – January 2012. Photographs by Rickard and Moyra Davey, George Georgiou, Deana Lawson, Viviane Sassen and Zhang Dali.
• 2012: Publicly Private: Enrico Natali and Doug Rickard, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA, January–April 2012. Enrico Natali’s New York Subway 1960 and Rickard’s A New American Picture. Curated by Karen Sinsheimer.
• 2012: Aperture Remix, Aperture Gallery, New York, October–November 2012. Curated by Lesley A. Martin with work by Rickard as well as Rinko Kawauchi, Vik Muniz, Alec Soth, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, Martin Parr, Viviane Sassen, Penelope Umbrico and James Welling. Toured to David Owsley Museum of Art Ball State University, Muncie, IN, January–March 2014; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA, May–October 2014.
• 2013: Tim Hetherington and Doug Rickard, Stills Gallery, Sydney, May–June 2013. Rickard's A New American Picture was shown alongside Tim Hetherington's Afghanistan.
• 2013/2014: Staking Claim: a California Invitational, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA, October 2013 – January 2014.

Rickard's work is held in the following permanent collections:

• Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY.
• Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.
• Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago, IL.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX.
• Museum of Modern Art, New York.
• Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO.
• New York Public Library, New York, NY.
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA.
• Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.