A new American picture

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 often abandoned. With an informed and deliberate eye, Rickard finds and decodes these previously photographed scenes of urban and rural decay. He photographs the machine-made images as they appear on his computer screen, framing and freeing them from their technological origins.