ANAP D.R. A New American Picture

Name: ANAP D.R. A New American Picture
Brand: White Press / Schaden
SKU: 2622
Price: 600.00 EUR
Availability: LimitedAvailability
Author: Doug Rickard

€600.00

Limited handcrafted edition, signed and numbered 155/200. American street scenes, using the internet platform Google Street View.

A New American Picture depicts American street scenes, located using the internet platform Google Street View. Over a four-year period, Rickard took advantage of Google’s massive image archive to virtually explore the roads of America looking for forgotten, economically devastated, and largely abandoned places. After locating and composing scenes of urban and rural decay, Rickard re-photographed the images on his computer screen with a tripod- mounted camera, freeing the image from its technological origins and re-presenting them on a new documentary plane. The low-resolution images that Rickard favors have a dissolved, painterly effect, and are occasionally populated with figures who acknowledge the camera, but whose faces are blurred, masking their identity. The photographs are thus imbued with an added surrealism and anonymity, which reinforces the isolation of the subjects and emphasizes the effects of an increasingly stratified American social structure. Rickard’s work evokes a connection to the tradition of American street photography, with knowing references to Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Stephen Shore. He both follows and advances that tradition, with a documentary strategy that acknowledges an increasingly technological world—a world in which a camera mounted on a moving car can generate evidence of the people and places it is leaving behind. Collectively, these images present a photographic portrait of the socially disenfranchised and economically powerless, those living an inversion of the American Dream. (text: http://www.dougrickard.com)

Doug Rickard

Bibliographic Details

Author	Doug Rickard
Publisher	White Press / Schaden
Place of publication	Köln
Year	2010
Edition	First edition
Binding	Hardcover
Language	English
Dimensions	22,5 x 33,5
Collation	92 pp.

Condition Report

Condition	As New
Cover	As New
Notes	Very nice copy, signed and numbered 155/200. Tiny bump on bottom edge of cover near spine, see image. Without dust jacket (as issued).

Availability In stock

Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture: Documentary Photography After Google

Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture is an important early photobook made from Google Street View. Rather than photographing on American streets himself, Rickard searched Google’s image archive, selected and reframed scenes on his monitor, and photographed the screen. The result joins an older tradition of American street and landscape photography to questions about automated image-making, surveillance, privacy, and inequality.

The 2010 first edition

The 2010 White Press/Schaden hardcover was published in Cologne. The International Centre for the Image’s library catalogue records it as an English-language, 92-page book measuring 335 × 230 mm and issued in an edition of 200 (International Centre for the Image).

That institutional record resolves a discrepancy in specialist descriptions: Josef Chladek describes the limitation as 250 copies (Josef Chladek). Collectors should therefore consult a copy’s own colophon when documenting its number or issue rather than assume that every online description refers to the same state.

The 2010 book must also be distinguished from the expanded 2012 Aperture edition. Aperture records the later book as a 144-page hardback, ISBN 9781597112192, containing more than thirty additional images (Aperture).

How the pictures were made

Rickard studied United States history and sociology at the University of California, San Diego. For this series, he used Street View to locate places marked by high unemployment and limited educational opportunity. MoMA explains that he composed the Google images on screen, photographed them with a digital camera, removed the Google watermark, and cropped them to a panoramic format (MoMA, New Photography 2011).

The procedure distributes authorship across several stages: Google’s camera system first records a street; its interface makes that record searchable; Rickard then chooses a location, viewpoint, moment, crop, and final physical form. The people in the pictures did not pose for him, and the original images were made for navigation rather than art. Rickard’s selections turn that utilitarian archive into a sustained account of how parts of the United States are seen—or passed over—by networked cameras.

The low resolution, stitching, blur, and elevated camera viewpoint are not incidental defects. They disclose the mediating apparatus. Faces are obscured and figures can appear isolated, while the viewpoint of the mapping vehicle differs from the bodily position associated with conventional street photography. MoMA consequently reads the series in relation to poverty, racial equity, the abundance of web imagery, and personal privacy.

From limited book to wider publication

The 2010 monograph was named a best book of the year by Photo-Eye and quickly sold out, according to Aperture’s publication history. The work was also included in MoMA’s New Photography 2011 exhibition (Aperture; MoMA). Those events preceded the larger Aperture/Koenig edition of 2012 and helped move the project from a small publication to a wider audience.

Collector’s notes

The 2010 edition is identified by the White Press/Schaden imprint, Cologne publication place, 2010 date, 92-page extent, hardcover format, and edition of 200 recorded by the International Centre for the Image. Because external catalogues conflict about the total limitation, a copy’s colophon should be documented when establishing its individual number or state. The 2012 edition is readily distinguished by its Aperture/Koenig publication, 144 pages, expanded image selection, and ISBN 9781597112192.

A New American Picture remains significant not simply because it used a novel source. It showed how documentary photography could be made by searching and editing an existing machine-generated archive—and how the biases, distances, and visual artifacts of that archive could become part of the work’s meaning.