Doug Rickard

By simply rephotographing printed advertisements in the late 1970s, Richard Prince unleashed a powerful new type of critique in contemporary art, while exposing the powerful resonance of commercial photography. Thirty-one years later, as web publishing began to supplant print media, Doug Rickard started to focus his camera directly at his computer screen, on images of impoverished American neighborhoods taken from Google Maps’ Street View, in order to reexamine the dusty genre of social documentary photography.

Like Prince, Rickard is an obsessive collector of pictures, which he sifts through and curates with his lens. The works on view in his current exhibition, “A New American Picture,” present a remarkable range of sensitivity and depth, despite his role as a remote observer of these destinations. In #39.177833, Baltimore, MD (2008), 2011, an intersection half ensconced in dramatic sunlight carries the operatic weight of a classic Robert Frank scene. The mottled grain of this image (a quality that varies as Google’s imaging technology improves) gives it an appealing painterly feel that belies the uneasy interaction between its two figures—a backlit man standing in the street, and a young girl to his left, the pair separated by a building’s shadow. The meeting could be familial or something more nefarious. In similar fashion, #29.942566, New Orleans, LA. (2008), 2009, which catches four teens walking by a dilapidated cemetery, evokes both the spiritual beauty of a John Constable painting (through its canopy of sun-drenched cumulus clouds) and the deep despair of a Dorothea Lange Dust Bowl photograph.

While documentary photography is still widely practiced, Rickard is among the few photographers today, along with Trevor Paglen, who interact with bureaucratic technologies in order to more accurately describe how most Americans engage with reality. Confronting works that use these technologies reminds us not only how much we’ve changed in the way we interact but also, conversely, how stubbornly racial and economic inequality in our country resists change.