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Doug Rickard, #82.948842, Detroit, MI (2009), from A New American Picture, 2010, archival pigment print, courtesy of the artist and Stephen Wirtz Gallery
Photographer Doug Rickard (b. 1968) creates images of some of the nation's poorest cities and towns. In his series A New American Picture, Rickard employs images from Google Street View to create a portrait of Great Recession-era America. Rickard carefully selected the images in this series to bring to light the American landscape and its economic segregation. Motivated by the histories of race and class in the United States, Rickard used Street View to survey significant cities and locations in the history of the Civil Rights Movement, such as Selma and Birmingham, Alabama. As the series developed, he deliberately chose places identified by realtors' websites as "bad neighborhoods," "areas to avoid," and other codes for places inhabited by the poor and underclass.
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"I SORT OF LOST WHO I WAS, AS A PUERTO RICAN, BECAUSE I ASSOCIATED THAT WITH BEING POOR AND BEING OF THE LOWER-MIDDLE CLASS. SO I LOST PART OF MY IDENTITY WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE, BECAUSE I DIDN'T WANT TO ASSOCIATE WITH THAT; I WANTED TO BE LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE."
Classless Society Stories Project
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IN THE NEWS
ABOUT
I THINK THAT ME AND MY FAMILY ARE PART OF THE AMERICAN DREAM...
(:58 sec)
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Where I grew up, everybody pretty much was the same class; everybody was hard-working, working middle class, working upper-middle class, lower-middle class, what have you. Everybody got along - different races, different colors, different creeds, different religions. And we just grew up. You know, we hung out together, we played sports together.
Classless Society Stories Project
We like diversity and we like programs such as affirmative action because they tell us that racism is the problem we need to solve and that solving it requires us just to give up our prejudices. (Solving the problem of economic inequality might require something more; it might require us to give up our money.)
Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 89.
My idea of class has come from my experiences growing up in a working class community of color in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then coming to Skidmore College, where it's largely white and elite, in terms of class status. And I think my experiences have showed me that we really need to have concrete analysis of sort of how inequality and power sort of manifests itself. I think that there's a lot of theories and a lot of sort of jargon that goes on in the academy, about what class is. And I think that comes from the fact that the academy itself is a place where mostly bourgeois upper class and middle class people reside. And there's sort of a fear to identify the fact that there are multiple layers and it's about ownership and power, and not really about what kind of income we are making, right?
Classless Society Stories Project
WHERE I GREW UP, EVERYBODY PRETTY MUCH WAS THE SAME CLASS...
WE LIKE DIVERSITY AND WE LIKE PROGRAMS SUCH AS AFFIRMATIVE ACTION BECAUSE THEY TELL US THAT RACISM IS THE PROBLEM WE NEED TO SOLVE AND THAT SOLVING IT REQUIRES US JUST TO GIVE UP OUR PREJUDICES...
MY IDEA OF CLASS HAS COME FROM MY EXPERIENCE GROWING UP IN A WORKING-CLASS COMMUNITY OF COLOR...
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I'M SOMEBODY WHO TRULY BELIEVES IN THE WORDS OF MALCOLM X...
(1:16 min)
