#40.805716, Bronx, NY (2007)

Label

Doug Rickard finds American street scenes by sorting through millions of images and adjusting viewing angles on the Internet platform Google Street View. His practice reinserts the eye of the photographer into a relatively new, seemingly authorless form of systematic photography taken by Google Street View cars. He searches Street View’s image archive to explore economically devastated and largely abandoned places in order to identify candid scenes that reflect large-scale phenomena in the United States. After locating and composing scenes, Rickard rephotographs the images on his computer with a tripod-mounted camera. In doing so, he arguably creates a more intentional form of street photography that advances the American photographic tradition with a documentary strategy that acknowledges an increasingly technological world—a world in which a camera mounted on a moving car, instead of a camera belonging to the photographer, can generate evidence of the people and places it is leaving behind.

Rickard’s work also points to the fact that all people and property are available for public view at any moment. Although people’s faces and house numbers are blurred in Street View’s renderings, real moments are being captured in a systematic and methodical way that undermines privacy. But, again, Rickard’s image show us how human judgment in searching and curating these images can create images that have meaning, which has the opposite effect of meaningless imagery taken by machinery.

From the 2019 exhibition A Space for Dialogue 95, Creating Knowledge and Control, curated by Annabelle Bardenheier '19, Conroy Programming Intern

Course History

Engineering Graduate 182.01, Engineering Sciences Masters Program 182.01, Data Analytics, Erin Mayfield, Winter 2024

Exhibition History

A Space for Dialogue 92, Consent: Complicating Agency in Photography, Ashley Dotson, Class of 2018, Conroy Intern, Gina Campanelli, Class of 2018, Class of 1954 Intern, Kimberly Yu, Class of 2018, Homma Family Intern, Marie-Therese Cummings, Class of 2018, Levinson Intern, Tess McGuinness, Class of 2018, Conroy Intern, Alvin P. Gutman Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 26-May 5, 2019.

A Space for Dialogue 95, Creating Knowledge And Control, Annabelle Bardenheier, Class of 2019, Conroy Intern, Alvin P. Gutman Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, August 10-September 22, 2019.

Publication History

Annabelle Bardenheier, Class of 2019, Conroy Intern, A Space for Dialogue 95, Creating Knowledge And Control, Hanover, New Hampshire: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2019.

Ashley Dotson, Class of 2018, Conroy Intern, Gina Campanelli, Class of 2018, Class of 1954 Intern, Kimberly Yu, Class of 2018, Homma Family Intern, Marie-Therese Cummings, Class of 2018, Levinson Intern, Tess McGuinness, Class of 2018, Conroy Intern, A Space for Dialogue 92, Consent, Complicating Agency in Photography, Hanover, New Hampshire: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2019.

Provenance

Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, New York; sold to present collection, 2017.

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Subjects