Doug Rickard, A New American Picture, Aperture, 2012.
www.dougrickard.com/
Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture offers a startling and fresh perspective on American street photography. While on first glance the work looks reassuringly familiar and well within the traditional bounds of the genre, his 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 deliberate 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.” A limited-edition monograph of A New American Picture was published by White Press/Schaden in 2010. It was named a best book of 2010 by photo-eye magazine and is now out of print. This edition brings Rickard’s provocative series, including more than forty new images, to a wider audience. - www.dougrickard.com/publications/a-new-american-picture-aperture-foundation-2012/
Doug Rickard is a photographer from Sacramento, California, whose ambitious project “A New American Picture” incorporates images of contemporary American Life from across the United States. Rickard, however, spent thousands of travel hours logged for this project sitting in a darkened studio and virtually driving the byways of Google Street View (GSW). He has moved through and captured images from desolate areas reeling from the effects of racial inequality, the grim effects of poverty, and the failures in social history. The images both indict the barbarity of power and evoke the strange beauty of a shattered environment.
by Spring Warren
From Boom Winter 2012, Vol. 2, No. 4
Spring Warren: An introduction to your work reads that you “present a startling photographic portrait of the socially disenfranchised, providing deeply affecting evidence of the American dream inverted.” Was this your aim when you began?
Doug Rickard: I am the son of an evangelical preacher that had a church in largely white, affluent Los Gatos in the eighties that had grown over twenty-five years from 100 or so members to over 6,000. My father was very conservative, and his view was our Christian nation had been specifically blessed by God to lead the world. When I went to school at UC San Diego and studied slavery, the Civil Rights movement, Jim Crow-era laws and customs, I saw the nation in a light quite different than I had seen it growing up. This collision of world views informed where I would take “A New American Picture.”
Following that, I became interested in the broken areas as a whole. From the beginning, I used the description of the American Dream inverted. My working title was actually “Empire,” and I saw a segment of our nation as sort of the pawns on the chessboard of this empire. For those without economic or educational power, the American Dream is often a myth.
New Orleans, Louisiana. © Doug Rickard. COURTESY OF YOSSI MILO GALLERY, NEW YORK AND STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO.
Warren: The places in the images are much emptier than one would expect to see. Further, though the locations span the country, each place strongly resembles the other. Concrete, asphalt, grass, and weeds growing through cracks in the sidewalk and not growing much elsewhere, old cars, graffiti, peeling paint, boarded windows, rust, and disrepair seem to happen in the same way no matter where. In light of this, what were the ways you saw different areas of the country distinguish themselves?
Rickard: To be fair, I wanted to load the work with a feeling of alienation, and I sought pictures out that reflected this. But at the same time, these places—Detroit, Fresno, Camden, Buffalo, Gary, South Dallas, Baltimore, Memphis, etc.—are in fact this way. And in the smaller cities—Wasco, California; Helena, Arkansas; Port Arthur, Texas—there are endless blocks of shuttered businesses and homes. Burned carcasses of architecture and people wandering around trying to survive and exist. And the color lines are still severe and based on economic conditions.
I agree there are very common physical [visual] elements at play here that are linked perhaps to poverty. I would see the same things in the areas of our nation that are devastated . . . what you just listed and also broken-down cars with people peering under the hood, liquor stores and churches, emptiness whether in the streets, the land, or the business buildings and homes. But beyond these common themes I was looking for representation of our nation’s diversity as well. I wanted to use both color and geographical markers, weather and architecture to build out a feeling of “America”—so you see urban areas that are entirely cement but also the rural and entirely overgrown, the brownstones and tall buildings, and the palm trees and ranch-style homes too, all guided by my own perceptions of the places. Even though I have never been in those places, I have a “feeling” of Detroit and of Dallas and Miami which comes from the media and the stories we hear.
The Bronx, New York. © Doug Rickard. COURTESY OF YOSSI MILO GALLERY, NEW YORK AND STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO.
Warren: There is a certain 1970s-esque palette to this work and so many old cars and buildings in the landscapes that, but for knowing that the street view project was begun in 2007, it would be difficult to pinpoint the time in which these pictures were taken. It is interesting that technology that shouts NEW creates a visual confusion as to time. Was this something you tried to heighten?
Rickard: Absolutely. I was drawn to the less clear imagery, the “lower res” if you will. What this means in literal terms is that I only took pictures where the images were taken by Google’s early cameras. Luckily, this was most of the country at the time, and certainly the economically broken areas. I suppose that this is interesting in itself as the project is dealing with technology and yet I limited the views that I would show to the most broken-down and “painterly” of visual images. Much of this is really due to how I associate beauty. I favored the broken images as I felt that they were beautiful and contained a certain poetry. Finally, these broken-down images helped me load the work with the type of emotional feeling that I wanted to impart. I was looking for pictures to reinforce notions of the entropy that you mention, along with isolation, abandonment, neglect, alienation. So in a sense, this work is very much controlled by me and loaded by me. It contains some elements of a document but also really functions as art.
Warren: Speaking of art, there’s been a lot of uproar about the fact that you didn’t physically take the images with your own camera, though found object art has been accepted since Duchamp took it on. The problem seems these are photographs not of your making—but screen captures. How do you answer when people accuse you of not being author of your art?
Rickard: Yes, as you mention, the history of art from Duchamp to Richard Prince and others is filled with the reuse and recontextualization of material, be it physical objects or images. In this case, the ability to affect the work itself for me was particularly pronounced. In essence, GSV is a frozen work that you navigate within, that you move within, and travel through. You have a massive amount of influence over what you ultimately choose to do within this world. This includes the composing of the pictures—you have 360-degree movement, also up and down, also the geometry skews with your movement, which you can control to affect “feeling”—the editing of what you look for and choose to show, and finally how the whole of these pictures functions itself. In my case, I was able to use these elements to embed many layers of meaning. These elements were so pronounced as to connect me strongly to photography as a history and a whole. I wanted to do something here that paralleled Robert Frank, Walker Evans, and others who have turned their eye on the American experience. The movement and scale of reach within this platform allowed for this to occur. You have outlined some of the results in your own questions, and there are more that exist for each individual viewer and what they bring to the equation when viewing.
Detroit, Michigan. © Doug Rickard. COURTESY OF YOSSI MILO GALLERY, NEW YORK AND STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO.
Chicago, Illinois. © Doug Rickard. COURTESY OF YOSSI MILO GALLERY, NEW YORK AND STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO.
Warren: How much does the idea of your work add to the perception of it? I guess I’m asking if you feel a single image could stand without the tapestry of the entire project, and more importantly, without any explanation of the concept that “A New American Picture” is embedded in?
Rickard: The concept here was, of course, very important, but I felt that the actual pictures had to stand as individuals. I think that concept alone is typically thin—though there are times in art’s history, of course, where concept is strong enough to stand alone; and I want idea to be married to strength of the images—that was much of the point.
Warren: I love the term “screen capture.” It conveys the sense of the hunt, of tracking down these images on the Web. But doing so seems more of a treasure hunt, of searching out inert objects, than it is akin to tracking live images that one shoots with a camera. Talk to me about the different feel of the two processes and where some of the same skills intersect in these two ways of taking images.
Rickard: This is an interesting area of intersection. With GSV, both elements form a crossroads of sorts, as GSV has a great deal of movement that one can impart on to a frozen world. What I mean is, with Google taking nine images every ten meters and stitching them together, one is left with the ability to compose a scene. Not freely as one does with a camera out in the world, or with the naked eye, but somewhere in between. I needed this movement to create this body of work. It allowed me to get the same feeling that I would get out in the world doing photography on the street. And yet, something else was contained that was fascinating to me . . . the ability to encounter subjects that were unaware or semi-aware of the camera itself. That left certain feelings embedded into the work that would not be there if done by traditional means.
I am certainly also very interested in the use of entirely static images. The Internet is expanding so quickly. I have heard that 30 billion pictures will be taken next year alone with a good portion of those ending up on the Internet. This dynamic, the ability to take unlimited pictures from millions and millions of devices, is changing the way that we see the world. Photography and art will undoubtedly be affected and in my view, it is extraordinary and fascinating. This is an area that we could talk about for hours, this topic alone.
Warren: Yes, the Digital Age seems to be in a position of remolding not only our ideas of art, but privacy, time, and even reality. We are caught in the process not only in GVS but by surveillance cameras, and we no longer own or control our own image. Do you feel a little itchy recognizing how much we are at the mercy of other people’s electronic and possibly voyeuristic gaze? Are you concerned with the way your art may conflict with personal privacy?
Baltimore, Maryland. © Doug Rickard.?COURTESY OF YOSSI MILO GALLERY, NEW YORK AND STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO.
Rickard: In the era of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, we trade the power that is contained in these tools for our own control of our privacy. I don’t think that you can have both. We are in an era where privacy will continue to erode and all of us will live a partially “public” life whether we want to or not. The technologists would say, “If you don’t like it, simply unplug and don’t use those products.” But we mostly will continue to use these products. I think that there will be pros and cons to this in the future. We just don’t yet know the severity of it.
Art tends to stem perhaps from all of the implications in any given era and the Internet is a decidedly strong implication. Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” plays a part in what I did. It doesn’t translate necessarily into a certain thing happening in that moment—a man falling down, a house burning—in fact, I avoided anything that was “dramatic” in terms of the scene. Instead, the decisive moment translates into how things are visually and aesthetically reading in that moment. Where the sunlight is coming from, where the subject’s gaze is directed, where the subject is in the frame versus the building outline, etc. What that really translates into then is a certain beauty or perhaps a transcendent moment.
As to voyeurism, I think that photography itself and those who are drawn to it have a particular curiosity about how things look, how things play out and operate around them. I am always in the moment visually, looking and absorbing and remembering. The way I take in faces and things and databank them I also do with images from the Web, hoarding and archiving and retaining their elements in my mind. I probably have 100,000 images plus from the Web, organized by topic and category.
Atlanta, Georgia. © Doug Rickard. COURTESY OF YOSSI MILO GALLERY, NEW YORK AND STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO.
Warren: You do have a couple of amazing photography sites. “These Americans” launched in March 2012 has home-shot Polaroids of Richard Pryor, crime scenes photos, road trips, and sex images, to name only a few categories. The other, “American Suburb X,” you call a “fiercely edited look at photography’s massively relevant past, dramatically shifting present and rapidly unfolding future.” Tell me about “fiercely edited” and about the different muscles it takes to be a collector, an artist, and an editor, and how these things work together.
Rickard: Editing is crucial. Within photography this is certainly the case, but it goes beyond that and into design, into details, into content itself, into how things play against each other. Editing is ultimately about making decisions, and those decisions directly determine the strength of anything that you do as an artist or otherwise.
These things should work together and in fact, in this era, they may end up as one and the same. Ultimately [the Internet] may change the way that museums and art silos function. The lines are being blurred. At the forefront of this blurring is an ability to edit. I think that it may end up as the crucial cog in an artist’s wheel.
“These Americans” is really an extension of my head. I collect and archive images both physical and digital on a scale that is scary in size. My conflicting views of our nation, its past, its present, its horrors, and its heroics, all play out in my mind, and visually, you can see evidence of my experience as an evangelist’s son, the realization of our nation’s darkest deeds which has given me direction. I don’t see myself doing any body of work that does not include some element of America as its foundation.
Warren: Californians seem to spend a great deal of time in their vehicles. Have you done a great deal of actual traveling as well as your impressive amount of virtual traveling?
Rickard: It’s true, our state seems entirely designed for automobiles and in most cases one can hardly even get a candy bar without driving to it. But I haven’t traveled much. I do plan to. I had only been to the East Coast once as a child and to the Northwest a few times. Now my wife and I have fourteen- and nine-year-old boys and a new baby girl, age seven months. They are always around when I’m working, lots of coffee and music; it’s really perfect, but not for travel. So part of this body of work was driven by necessity. I had no ability to go out and spend months on the road, but I was determined to do something on a broader America. That led me to GSV. Great things can come out of restraints. The limitations force you to innovate or find a new way of doing something.
This work kept me in a dark room behind a computer for a thousand hours or more, over three years making 10,000-plus pictures for this body of work—of which ultimately around eighty stood; California pictures number at twelve. This speaks loudly to the power this project held over me. I acclimated myself to this method of “driving.” I could go from the inner city of Camden, New Jersey, to the borderlands of southern New Mexico in the same evening. This constant ability to explore new areas was for me a thrill and pull. Of course, the real world is something on another level, but there were entirely powerful elements at work here.
Warren: Where will GVS take us from here? What other uses might be made of it?
Rickard: I am not sure. We’ll have to wait and see. I don’t see myself continuing to work with it for bodies of work beyond “A New American Picture.”
Warren: With fuel costs rising and reserves dwindling, the future does not bode well for the future average citizen who would like to travel. Artists have long brought far-off places within sight of those who couldn’t get there. What do you think it means when GSV, an automated image-maker, plays such a part in this?
Rickard: It is interesting, the point you make. I think that you would look beyond GSV to frame this. Technology itself is replacing travel in many cases. We are moving to a world that allows communication without travel on an unprecedented scale. This is only going to increase. So, while economic components may play a substantial role in the volume of travel, it is really the technological elements that are rapidly shifting our world. Certainly, only a certain percentage of the world touch technology, but almost all seem to be impacted. I suppose we can just call this impact by the heavily used word “globalization.”
Dallas, Texas. © Doug Rickard. COURTESY OF YOSSI MILO GALLERY, NEW YORK AND STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO.
Warren: Does it create a more true vision of the world, or less so?
Rickard: This is hard to answer. I think perhaps it does both things simultaneously, makes clearer and also diffuses or obscures. People now have access to information on a mind-boggling scale and literally at their fingertips at any moment. This is in the form of data, audio, and also visual information—pictures and video, if you will. At the same time, people may be experiencing “real life” less and relying on the representation of life on the screen at home and in their hands as a substitute for real life. Perhaps then we are on a road to “know” more but experience less. What that does for our vision of the world is perhaps yet to be determined.
http://www.boomcalifornia.com/2012/12/screen-captures-americans-on-google-street/by Spring Warren
From Boom Winter 2012, Vol. 2, No. 4
Spring Warren: An introduction to your work reads that you “present a startling photographic portrait of the socially disenfranchised, providing deeply affecting evidence of the American dream inverted.” Was this your aim when you began?
Doug Rickard: I am the son of an evangelical preacher that had a church in largely white, affluent Los Gatos in the eighties that had grown over twenty-five years from 100 or so members to over 6,000. My father was very conservative, and his view was our Christian nation had been specifically blessed by God to lead the world. When I went to school at UC San Diego and studied slavery, the Civil Rights movement, Jim Crow-era laws and customs, I saw the nation in a light quite different than I had seen it growing up. This collision of world views informed where I would take “A New American Picture.”
Following that, I became interested in the broken areas as a whole. From the beginning, I used the description of the American Dream inverted. My working title was actually “Empire,” and I saw a segment of our nation as sort of the pawns on the chessboard of this empire. For those without economic or educational power, the American Dream is often a myth.
New Orleans, Louisiana. © Doug Rickard. COURTESY OF YOSSI MILO GALLERY, NEW YORK AND STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO.
Rickard: To be fair, I wanted to load the work with a feeling of alienation, and I sought pictures out that reflected this. But at the same time, these places—Detroit, Fresno, Camden, Buffalo, Gary, South Dallas, Baltimore, Memphis, etc.—are in fact this way. And in the smaller cities—Wasco, California; Helena, Arkansas; Port Arthur, Texas—there are endless blocks of shuttered businesses and homes. Burned carcasses of architecture and people wandering around trying to survive and exist. And the color lines are still severe and based on economic conditions.
I agree there are very common physical [visual] elements at play here that are linked perhaps to poverty. I would see the same things in the areas of our nation that are devastated . . . what you just listed and also broken-down cars with people peering under the hood, liquor stores and churches, emptiness whether in the streets, the land, or the business buildings and homes. But beyond these common themes I was looking for representation of our nation’s diversity as well. I wanted to use both color and geographical markers, weather and architecture to build out a feeling of “America”—so you see urban areas that are entirely cement but also the rural and entirely overgrown, the brownstones and tall buildings, and the palm trees and ranch-style homes too, all guided by my own perceptions of the places. Even though I have never been in those places, I have a “feeling” of Detroit and of Dallas and Miami which comes from the media and the stories we hear.
The Bronx, New York. © Doug Rickard. COURTESY OF YOSSI MILO GALLERY, NEW YORK AND STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO.
Rickard: Absolutely. I was drawn to the less clear imagery, the “lower res” if you will. What this means in literal terms is that I only took pictures where the images were taken by Google’s early cameras. Luckily, this was most of the country at the time, and certainly the economically broken areas. I suppose that this is interesting in itself as the project is dealing with technology and yet I limited the views that I would show to the most broken-down and “painterly” of visual images. Much of this is really due to how I associate beauty. I favored the broken images as I felt that they were beautiful and contained a certain poetry. Finally, these broken-down images helped me load the work with the type of emotional feeling that I wanted to impart. I was looking for pictures to reinforce notions of the entropy that you mention, along with isolation, abandonment, neglect, alienation. So in a sense, this work is very much controlled by me and loaded by me. It contains some elements of a document but also really functions as art.
Warren: Speaking of art, there’s been a lot of uproar about the fact that you didn’t physically take the images with your own camera, though found object art has been accepted since Duchamp took it on. The problem seems these are photographs not of your making—but screen captures. How do you answer when people accuse you of not being author of your art?
Rickard: Yes, as you mention, the history of art from Duchamp to Richard Prince and others is filled with the reuse and recontextualization of material, be it physical objects or images. In this case, the ability to affect the work itself for me was particularly pronounced. In essence, GSV is a frozen work that you navigate within, that you move within, and travel through. You have a massive amount of influence over what you ultimately choose to do within this world. This includes the composing of the pictures—you have 360-degree movement, also up and down, also the geometry skews with your movement, which you can control to affect “feeling”—the editing of what you look for and choose to show, and finally how the whole of these pictures functions itself. In my case, I was able to use these elements to embed many layers of meaning. These elements were so pronounced as to connect me strongly to photography as a history and a whole. I wanted to do something here that paralleled Robert Frank, Walker Evans, and others who have turned their eye on the American experience. The movement and scale of reach within this platform allowed for this to occur. You have outlined some of the results in your own questions, and there are more that exist for each individual viewer and what they bring to the equation when viewing.
Detroit, Michigan. © Doug Rickard. COURTESY OF YOSSI MILO GALLERY, NEW YORK AND STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO.
Chicago, Illinois. © Doug Rickard. COURTESY OF YOSSI MILO GALLERY, NEW YORK AND STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO.
Rickard: The concept here was, of course, very important, but I felt that the actual pictures had to stand as individuals. I think that concept alone is typically thin—though there are times in art’s history, of course, where concept is strong enough to stand alone; and I want idea to be married to strength of the images—that was much of the point.
Warren: I love the term “screen capture.” It conveys the sense of the hunt, of tracking down these images on the Web. But doing so seems more of a treasure hunt, of searching out inert objects, than it is akin to tracking live images that one shoots with a camera. Talk to me about the different feel of the two processes and where some of the same skills intersect in these two ways of taking images.
Rickard: This is an interesting area of intersection. With GSV, both elements form a crossroads of sorts, as GSV has a great deal of movement that one can impart on to a frozen world. What I mean is, with Google taking nine images every ten meters and stitching them together, one is left with the ability to compose a scene. Not freely as one does with a camera out in the world, or with the naked eye, but somewhere in between. I needed this movement to create this body of work. It allowed me to get the same feeling that I would get out in the world doing photography on the street. And yet, something else was contained that was fascinating to me . . . the ability to encounter subjects that were unaware or semi-aware of the camera itself. That left certain feelings embedded into the work that would not be there if done by traditional means.
I am certainly also very interested in the use of entirely static images. The Internet is expanding so quickly. I have heard that 30 billion pictures will be taken next year alone with a good portion of those ending up on the Internet. This dynamic, the ability to take unlimited pictures from millions and millions of devices, is changing the way that we see the world. Photography and art will undoubtedly be affected and in my view, it is extraordinary and fascinating. This is an area that we could talk about for hours, this topic alone.
Warren: Yes, the Digital Age seems to be in a position of remolding not only our ideas of art, but privacy, time, and even reality. We are caught in the process not only in GVS but by surveillance cameras, and we no longer own or control our own image. Do you feel a little itchy recognizing how much we are at the mercy of other people’s electronic and possibly voyeuristic gaze? Are you concerned with the way your art may conflict with personal privacy?
Baltimore, Maryland. © Doug Rickard.?COURTESY OF YOSSI MILO GALLERY, NEW YORK AND STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO.
Art tends to stem perhaps from all of the implications in any given era and the Internet is a decidedly strong implication. Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” plays a part in what I did. It doesn’t translate necessarily into a certain thing happening in that moment—a man falling down, a house burning—in fact, I avoided anything that was “dramatic” in terms of the scene. Instead, the decisive moment translates into how things are visually and aesthetically reading in that moment. Where the sunlight is coming from, where the subject’s gaze is directed, where the subject is in the frame versus the building outline, etc. What that really translates into then is a certain beauty or perhaps a transcendent moment.
As to voyeurism, I think that photography itself and those who are drawn to it have a particular curiosity about how things look, how things play out and operate around them. I am always in the moment visually, looking and absorbing and remembering. The way I take in faces and things and databank them I also do with images from the Web, hoarding and archiving and retaining their elements in my mind. I probably have 100,000 images plus from the Web, organized by topic and category.
Atlanta, Georgia. © Doug Rickard. COURTESY OF YOSSI MILO GALLERY, NEW YORK AND STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO.
Rickard: Editing is crucial. Within photography this is certainly the case, but it goes beyond that and into design, into details, into content itself, into how things play against each other. Editing is ultimately about making decisions, and those decisions directly determine the strength of anything that you do as an artist or otherwise.
These things should work together and in fact, in this era, they may end up as one and the same. Ultimately [the Internet] may change the way that museums and art silos function. The lines are being blurred. At the forefront of this blurring is an ability to edit. I think that it may end up as the crucial cog in an artist’s wheel.
“These Americans” is really an extension of my head. I collect and archive images both physical and digital on a scale that is scary in size. My conflicting views of our nation, its past, its present, its horrors, and its heroics, all play out in my mind, and visually, you can see evidence of my experience as an evangelist’s son, the realization of our nation’s darkest deeds which has given me direction. I don’t see myself doing any body of work that does not include some element of America as its foundation.
Warren: Californians seem to spend a great deal of time in their vehicles. Have you done a great deal of actual traveling as well as your impressive amount of virtual traveling?
Rickard: It’s true, our state seems entirely designed for automobiles and in most cases one can hardly even get a candy bar without driving to it. But I haven’t traveled much. I do plan to. I had only been to the East Coast once as a child and to the Northwest a few times. Now my wife and I have fourteen- and nine-year-old boys and a new baby girl, age seven months. They are always around when I’m working, lots of coffee and music; it’s really perfect, but not for travel. So part of this body of work was driven by necessity. I had no ability to go out and spend months on the road, but I was determined to do something on a broader America. That led me to GSV. Great things can come out of restraints. The limitations force you to innovate or find a new way of doing something.
This work kept me in a dark room behind a computer for a thousand hours or more, over three years making 10,000-plus pictures for this body of work—of which ultimately around eighty stood; California pictures number at twelve. This speaks loudly to the power this project held over me. I acclimated myself to this method of “driving.” I could go from the inner city of Camden, New Jersey, to the borderlands of southern New Mexico in the same evening. This constant ability to explore new areas was for me a thrill and pull. Of course, the real world is something on another level, but there were entirely powerful elements at work here.
Warren: Where will GVS take us from here? What other uses might be made of it?
Rickard: I am not sure. We’ll have to wait and see. I don’t see myself continuing to work with it for bodies of work beyond “A New American Picture.”
Warren: With fuel costs rising and reserves dwindling, the future does not bode well for the future average citizen who would like to travel. Artists have long brought far-off places within sight of those who couldn’t get there. What do you think it means when GSV, an automated image-maker, plays such a part in this?
Rickard: It is interesting, the point you make. I think that you would look beyond GSV to frame this. Technology itself is replacing travel in many cases. We are moving to a world that allows communication without travel on an unprecedented scale. This is only going to increase. So, while economic components may play a substantial role in the volume of travel, it is really the technological elements that are rapidly shifting our world. Certainly, only a certain percentage of the world touch technology, but almost all seem to be impacted. I suppose we can just call this impact by the heavily used word “globalization.”
Dallas, Texas. © Doug Rickard. COURTESY OF YOSSI MILO GALLERY, NEW YORK AND STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO.Rickard: This is hard to answer. I think perhaps it does both things simultaneously, makes clearer and also diffuses or obscures. People now have access to information on a mind-boggling scale and literally at their fingertips at any moment. This is in the form of data, audio, and also visual information—pictures and video, if you will. At the same time, people may be experiencing “real life” less and relying on the representation of life on the screen at home and in their hands as a substitute for real life. Perhaps then we are on a road to “know” more but experience less. What that does for our vision of the world is perhaps yet to be determined.
By Ellen Gamerman, Wall Street Journal, September 2013
With explosive disclosures about the long arm of the National Security Agency, the nation is engaged in an intense debate about privacy and spying. Now there is another snoop in town: the contemporary artist.
Doug Rickard’s Surveillance Art
Fine-art photographers are flocking to what some are calling “surveillance art”—a wide-ranging practice that includes trolling online to appropriate photos of strangers, presenting images of top-secret sites from the ground and air and using covert tactics to shoot unsuspecting subjects. The work is landing in major museums, appearing at high-profile galleries and fetching more than $60,000—even if some of it is lifted straight off the Internet.
California artist Doug Rickard created portraits of blighted inner-city neighborhoods using Google GOOG +0.42% Street View. Photographer Arne Svenson trained a Telephoto lens inside the apartments of a tony New York apartment building. British artist Mishka Henner used documents exposed by the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks to help verify his images of secret U.S. military outposts. German photographer Jens Sundheim tracked down more than 400 webcams with online feeds around the world and posed in front of them (he says New York City cops once questioned him for suspicious behavior by a traffic camera).
Arne Svenson used a Telephoto lens to photograph inside an upscale New York apartment building. A couple sued over two images that they say partially depict their children. The suit was dismissed; an appeal has begun. Above, ‘The Neighbors #28.’ Arne Svenson/Julie Saul Gallery, New York
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Mishka Henner’s Google Street View series (shown, an image) attempted to capture isolated women on the margins of society in Italy and elsewhere Mishka Henner
“We’re entering a place where so many pictures and possibilities are being uploaded onto the Internet in various facets—that’s a new frontier,” says Mr. Rickard. “I see it as a new age for exploration.”
Such work is being sought out by a new breed of collector as well as many established museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern in London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. The current triennial exhibit at the International Center of Photography in New York includes many works inspired by surveillance themes.
This new type of art is raising all kinds of thorny legal questions about such issues as privacy violations and permissible use of appropriated images, particularly where online images are concerned. “It’s a huge issue,” says Catherine Edelman, president of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers. “The Internet has completely changed what we consider to be the rules within the photography world.”
That video you post to YouTube, and the public photo of your child on Facebook could become art. Surveillance art, from secret government military sites to strangers caught with a webcam, is increasingly coveted by collectors. Ellen Gamerman explains the trend on Lunch Break. Photo: Philipp Sarasin/Julie Saul Gallery, New York.
Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué’s work includes stills from online cellphone videos—grainy pictures of gunmen with weapons drawn—that he says were taken the split-second before the people behind the lens were shot (though he adds that there is no independent verification). Mr. Mroué, whose artworks and installations sell anywhere from $8,000 to $66,000, is featured in the current New York photo triennial. Since the names and fates of the alleged victims are unknown, he doesn’t consider such videos a violation of their privacy. “These are videos on the Internet,” he says. “Once you watch these videos, you are already involved. You can’t run away from them—you become a witness.”
The rise in such art comes as people around the world fret over the limits of their real-world and online privacy. The live-out-loud party of the social-networking era has given way to caution as people worry the family photos they share could one day get tagged with facial-recognition software, or whether shots of their children could be repurposed without their knowledge. In a Pew Research Center survey released this month, half of all Internet users said they worry about the amount of their personal details available online, up from 33% in 2009.
Though provocative, today’s work is part of a storied tradition of spy-style photography. In the early 1900s, Paul Strand distracted strangers with a dummy lens while actually photographing them through a secret lens under his arm. In the 1930s, Walker Evans surreptitiously shot New York subway riders with a hidden camera, bringing a friend to help give him cover. Japanese artist Kohei Yoshiyuki in the 1970s used infrared film to photograph hidden sexual encounters in Tokyo parks. In the 1990s, Merry Alpern took photos through a window of a dingy sex club in Manhattan and got footage of women in fitting rooms with a video camera peeking through the holes of her eyelet-leather purse.
Trevor Paglen uses flight manifests and the Defense Department budget to track and then photograph his subjects, often tiny dots in the sky. Shown, ‘Dead Satellite with Nuclear Reactor.’ Trevor Paglen/Altman Siegel, San Francisco/Metro Pictures, New York/Thomas Zander, Cologne
Today, Trevor Paglen is exploring surveillance themes in broader ways: His painterly photographs, which sell for $15,000 and up, include images of unmarked government aircraft, clandestine military bases and drones.
The 38-year-old New York artist researches sources like flight manifests, the Defense Department budget and aerial photos to triangulate his targets. Amateur satellite trackers help him hunt for secret spacecraft. “I can track down to a quarter-of-a-second accuracy where a given satellite will be in the sky on any given evening,” he says.
The son of an Air Force ophthalmologist, he grew up around other people’s secrets. “We’d drop off a friend of mine’s dad in a cornfield,” he says, referring to the classified work surrounding his family during a stint in a U.S. military enclave in Wiesbaden, Germany. As an adult, he became fascinated by the world of black ops. Calling himself an “experimental geographer”—he has a Ph.D. in geography from the University of California, Berkeley—he stakes out unmarked military and intelligence sites with help from survey maps and Google Earth images, then treks through public land to get as close as he can to the perimeter. He may get his shot from a clearing or mountaintop more than 40 miles away. If he encounters security guards around a sensitive site, he attempts to appear nonconfrontational, staying off government property and avoiding any sudden moves. “It’s sort of trying to be cool,” he says.
“Big Brother is something that has always fascinated and terrified me,” says private art dealer Benjamin Reed Hunter, who last year purchased Mr. Paglen’s work. He says he bought faraway shots of a spy satellite and a U.S. military drone partly because U.S. intelligence operations had been dominating the news.
Mishka Henner used Google Earth images of what he calls censored areas. Above, ‘The Hague’ from the series ‘Dutch Landscapes.’ Mishka Henner
Indeed, drones have become an entire subgenre of surveillance-themed photographs: Martha Rosler’s “Theater of Drones” is a new 10-panel work that includes images of an MQ-9 Reaper drone ground-control station and the rubble of an alleged drone strike in Pakistan. James Bridle depicts images of Predator and Reaper drones in true-to-size silhouettes on streets and parking lots in the U.K. and elsewhere.
Other contemporary photographers act more like editors, looking for unguarded and intimate moments in an ocean of images taken by other people. About 1.6 trillion photos are taken annually with devices like smartphones and digital cameras, compared with about 100 billion a year in 2000, according to Fujifilm. There are now more than 16 billion photos on Instagram, 350 million photos are uploaded to Facebook daily and 100 hours of video are posted onto YouTube every minute. Expect more: Google Glass shoots photos with a simple voice command, the wearable “Autographer” sold in Europe uses a built-in computer to snap photos on its own and the Swedish company Memoto is selling a camera that automatically takes a photograph every 30 seconds—complete with a smartphone app that allows users to share the results.
Part of Doug Rickard’s ‘A New American Picture’ © Doug Rickard/Yossi Milo Gallery, New York and Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco
Museum curators and art dealers call this one of the liveliest periods in photography since the 1970s, when artists like Richard Prince appropriated consumer and mass-media images in their work as part of the so-called Pictures Generation. Mr. Prince now is among the contemporary photographers whose work dominates the market, with one of his famous “Cowboy” images selling in 2007 for $3.4 million, an auction record for his photo-driven work.
The question of who owns the copyright to the original photos and images used by artists is becoming a contentious issue. In April, Mr. Prince scored a major victory when the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in his favor, largely overturning an earlier decision that his use of photographs of Rastafarians by photographer Patrick Cariou violated copyright law.
Daniel J. Brooks, a lawyer for Mr. Cariou who recently filed a petition to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, says it is almost impossible for lower-profile photographers to stop big-name artists from using their work. “They’re just considered like so much raw material that’s there for the taking,” he says.
Other recent court rulings over the limits of artistic expression and the invasion of privacy have also backed artists. Last month, a state Supreme Court judge in Manhattan dismissed a lawsuit against Mr. Svenson, the artist who took photos inside a TriBeCa apartment building with a Telephoto lens. He sparked a small firestorm when works in the series “The Neighbors” went up at New York’s Julie Saul Gallery, priced at up to $12,000 each. A couple filed the complaint after finding that two of the photos featured images of their young children, according to court documents. A lawyer for the couple started the appeal process last week. Mr. Svenson wasn’t available for comment.
Such attention didn’t scare off collector Allen Thomas, Jr., a law firm manager from Wilson, N.C. He purchased one image by Mr. Svenson and raced to buy another after seeing a TV segment about the lawsuit. “There was a little, ‘I want to get in before I’m not able to,’” he says. “And I’m glad I did.”
From a studio in his detached garage in Shingle Springs, Calif., an old Gold Rush town outside Sacramento, 45-year-old artist Doug Rickard is pioneering a new approach to surveillance photography.
Mr. Rickard was working in software sales at Cisco Systems in 2008 when he says he became obsessed with Google Street View, which had been introduced the previous year. He began searching Internet forums for cities like Philadelphia, Camden, N.J., and New Orleans, looking for discussion threads where people talked about the poorest and most crime-ridden blocks. He spent hours late into the night, scrolling for miles and miles through those streets. When Google’s cameras randomly captured an image that spoke to him, he photographed his computer screen. He was interested in what he called the impersonal gaze of cameras mounted high atop cars sent into disenfranchised neighborhoods by a multinational corporation.
One of Mr. Rickard’s earliest collectors was Daphne Keller, then Google’s lead copyright lawyer. “The way I look at it, he’s documenting everyday Americana, and a lot of that is on the Internet now,” she says, adding that the photos spoke to her because they used a Google product in the name of art. Mr. Rickard’s series, called “A New American Picture,” was displayed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2011. It was his first American museum show.
The artist is grateful that when he created the gritty series, priced at $4,500 to $10,000, the screen quality of a Google Street View image wasn’t so glossy and sharp. The upgraded Street View makes even deteriorating blocks look better, stripping out the moody atmosphere and charged subtext, he says: “It’s this pretty view, and the sun is shining always.”
On a recent summer afternoon, Mr. Rickard is hunched over his newest series, a collection of melancholy images snatched from split-second moments on YouTube. The garage is quiet except for the whir of a fan. Lit by the glow of two computer screens, Mr. Rickard bores into the trove of videos, clicking on footage taken by people he hasn’t met and doesn’t plan to contact. He stops on one where an alleged drug addict performs tricks for an unseen photographer for $5.
Mr. Rickard watches the full video first, his bony middle finger poised over the mouse (he lost the fingertip while hanging off a wrought-iron chandelier in his hell-raising 20s). “It’s like he’s some sort of marionette or circus sideshow performer,” he says, watching the man do a neat line of backward handsprings down a dark city sidewalk. Then he slows the footage, clicking frame by frame to find his moment. It is like he’s shooting pictures from inside the hand of the person taking the video. He saves the image in case someone takes it down, adjusts it to a blurry, low-definition setting that fits his broken-down aesthetic and shoots a still photo of it on his computer screen with a camera on a tripod a couple of feet away. He plans to begin exhibiting his new series this fall in Europe.
After Mr. Rickard started on his YouTube series, he consulted with a lawyer to see who might sue him over this kind of work. The answer was probably not YouTube, which just provides the platform, but possibly the people taking the videos or appearing in them. For legal and aesthetic reasons, he only plans to use images where his subjects’ faces are masked by darkness, clothing or poor-quality video. A YouTube spokesman said the company encourages its users to credit original photographers when taking content from the site.
Mr. Rickard has amassed more than 450,000 pictures that he tucks into folders and subfolders with names like “Alpha Types,” “Patriots” and “Damage Control.” Every day, he copies photos online, whether on Facebook or in the Library of Congress. He spends as much as $700 a month buying found photos from various vendors.
“It’s almost like they’re all my negatives,” he says of other peoples’ images, which he plans to use in artwork over the next decade. “I’m going to use them to speak in a way that person didn’t necessarily intend.”
Doug Rickard
Doug Rickard’s newest series, called “N.A.,” isolates split-second moments of American life he finds buried in the millions of videos on YouTube. He searches for videos taken in crime-ridden neighborhoods and other urban locations and snaps a photo of his computer screen when an image grabs his eye.
The 45-year-old artist, who favors fitted wool hats over his buzz cut and keeps his tattoos mostly under his shirt, is a son of a onetime evangelical pastor. Mr. Rickard grew up in 1980s northern California, where his father led the 6,500-member Los Gatos Christian Church. “They might as well have had America and the church intertwined,” says the artist, whose work is sold at the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York and San Francisco’s Stephen Wirtz Gallery.
By his teen years, he rebelled. At 17, he says, he spent two weeks in a juvenile detention center after vandalizing his own house while his father, Marvin, was traveling in Africa with the televangelist Jerry Falwell.
At 24, things changed. After enrolling at the University of California, San Diego, he discovered the civil rights era and other turbulent American periods that until then hadn’t made much impact.
This came on the heels of a family crisis. In 1988, his father confessed to his congregation that he had an extramarital affair about seven years earlier. It was a secret the son knew and had kept since he was 12 years old after glimpsing the two adults together when they thought no one was looking. Some lifelong friends ditched his father. “It was vicious,” the son says.
Mr. Rickard now is very close to his parents, who are still married and dote on his wife and three children. But he calls this a formative artistic experience, prompting him to look for the fault lines in the American dream. “I’m pretty driven to critique, maybe even transgress,” he says. “I want to tread that line.”
Trevor Paglen
Work: The 38-year-old artist and author of five books has teamed with investigative reporters and human-rights groups on some of his projects, but he remains firmly in the art world. His work is sold at Metro Pictures in New York and the Altman Siegel Gallery in San Francisco, and he’s been exhibited at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate Modern in London and elsewhere.
Tools: Mr. Paglen uses high-powered telescopes to help him photograph classified military bases surrounded by so much restricted land they can’t necessarily be seen with the naked eye. At night, he uses telescopes to shoot what he thinks are secret satellites, such as “PAN,” left.
Sleuthing: Mr. Paglen’s grasp of geography helps. While trolling an online aviation forum, he recognized a dry lake bed in the background of an old promotional video for the Polecat drone. From there, he figured out the topography of the area in Nevada. He studied maps, mulling over how to find the best viewpoint of the military site, and got the shot.
Rabih Mroué
Work: The Lebanese artist, 46, heard that Syrian protesters were recording their own deaths with their cellphones and in 2011 amassed what he says are their jittery videos. He takes the last image of a gunman pointing his weapon at the lens and enlarges it to a barely readable close-up. Left, an image from the work “The Fall of a Hair.”
Fact or fiction: Mr. Mroué says that while he can’t independently verify the authenticity of the videos, he firmly believes they are real.
Questions: Mr. Mroué, who is also an actor and playwright, has shown the videos and still photos in the U.S., Europe and Beirut. “Why did the cameraman not run away immediately?” he asks. “My answer is simply because he is off camera he can’t see himself as a victim. He’s not in the frame.”
Arne Svenson
Work: The photographer, 60, shot his series “The Neighbors,” including “Neighbors #1,” right, from a window in his apartment, scanning the windows of apartments across the street with a Telephoto lens given to him by a bird-watcher friend.
Debate: A couple sued over two images that they say partially depict their children. The suit has been dismissed, but an appeal process has begun (more details in main text). New York dealer Julie Saul says those two works were never hung in the gallery, and the artist and gallery have tried to remove any traces of them from the Internet.
Reaction: Ms. Saul says the artist met with a lawyer before exhibiting this series. The dealer, who has represented Mr. Svenson for about 20 years, defends him: “This isn’t some paparazzi out of nowhere.”
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