Screen Captures: Americans on Google Street: An interview with artist Doug Rickard

Doug Rickard is a photographer from Sacramento, California, whose ambitious project “A New American Picture” incorporates images of contemporary American Life from across the United States. Rickard, however, spent the thousands of travel hours logged for this project sitting in a darkened studio and virtually driving the byways of Google Street View (GSV). He has moved through and captured images from desolate areas reeling from the effects of racial inequality, the grim effects of poverty, and the failures in social history. The images both indict the barbarity of power and evoke the strange beauty of a shattered environment.