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A New American Picture

Doug Rickard
Thursday, May 9, 2013 - 6:00pm
Media Theater (M110), Theater Arts Center (UCSC)
Presented by: 
Arts Division

Doug Rickard's A New American Picture is a photographic presentation of anonymous Americans, largely those that are economically powerless and in the margins. Over a period of nearly three years and a thousand hours or more, Rickard used the massive machine-made image archive of Google Street View to navigate the American streets, exploring the places that are economically devastated and largely semi-abandoned. Informed by the work of Walker Evans, Robert Frank and others and using a near documentary style, Rickard is connected to photographic tradition. Yet, using new tools with unimaginable access and possibility, Rickard has embraced a radically changing world and looks aggressively toward photography’s quickly changing future. Rickard will discuss in depth the social, cultural, racial, economic and technological implications of the work and talk about where art and photography may be headed.

 

Part of the 2013 Arts Division Lecture Series "Engaging the Mind"

free and open to the public

parking $4

 


Doug Rickard
was born in San Jose, California, in 1968, and studied US History and Sociology at UC San Diego, receiving his BA in 1994. He is the founder of American Suburb X and These Americans, aggregating websites for essays on contemporary photography and historical photographic archives. His body of work, A New American Picture was exhibited for the first time in 2010 at Le Bal, Paris, in an exhibition titled Anonymes, curated by David Campany and Diane Dufour, which also included work by Walker Evans, Lewis Baltz and Jeff Wall, among others. Rickard has also exhibited at Les Rencontres d’Arles, Pier 24 (San Francisco),  MMK Museum fur Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt) and the Museum of Modern Art (New York), among other places. His works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.