Arm Chair Photographer: Doug Rickard
Chelsea’s art openings started with Doug Rickard’s photographs at Yossi Milo Gallery. Although I’ve seen several of Rickard’s images at MoMA last year, these photographs resonated for me now and I enjoyed them. They depict squalid corners of major American cities: Detroit, Buffalo, Baltimore, as well as a few minor towns, such as Roswell, New Mexico, and are reminiscent of Robert Frank’s seminal The Americans. The difference here, is that Doug Rickard didn’t take the photographs in a traditional way. Rather, he observed them from Google Street View, and reprinted them. As a result, the highly blurry and sometimes extremely pixilated photographs have a appearance of a realist day dream. There is something about the act of looking–not from the real street but from Street View–that makes these photographs powerful.
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