Doug Rickard's Google Street View Photography

In a 2012 interview with Siobhán Bohnacker for Afterall, American photographer Doug Rickard discusses his series 'A New American Picture' (2006–10), which appropriates Google Street View imagery to document desolate American suburbs marked by racial inequality, poverty, and industrial decline. Rickard, working from his Sacramento home, re-photographed screen captures of Google's automated images, raising questions about authorship, voyeurism, and the ethics of street photography. He cites influences such as Walker Evans, Paul Graham, Jacob Holdt, Edward Hopper, and William Eggleston. The project explores themes of race, socio-economics, and the American dream, with Rickard acknowledging the exploitative nature inherent in photography. He describes the low-resolution first-generation Google cameras as offering a watercolor-like texture, and he made compositional decisions by panning and zooming within the 360-degree panoramas. The series ultimately comprises fewer than 100 images from an initial 10,000, printed to give them physicality and connect them to photographic tradition.