Doug Rickard, #27.144277, Okeechobee, FL (2008), from A New American Picture, 2011, 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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