American photographer Doug Rickard’s 2010 project “A New American Picture” represents the poorest neighborhoods in the United States as captured by Google Street View cameras. Wrenched from the internet and plastered on MoMA's white walls, Rickard’s selections render visible the relationship between urban disinvestment and digital mapping. This thesis traces two strands of twentieth century American history that come together in “A New American Picture”: the tandem emergence of neoliberal urban planning in the 1970s and ’80s and cartographic surveillance of poor American life for profit ever since. With this devastating history in mind, I question the political efficacy of ‘humanization’ as a mode of artistic engagement with systematically neglected subjects. In particular, I understand urban disinvestment and techno-surveillance as reliant on similar logics of personal freedom and interactivity that continue to govern our increasingly privatized world today. In turn, I contend artistic practice that re-articulates this ideology is ineffective as a means to critique dispossession. I suggest a number of alternative strategies: opacity rather than visibility, dynamism rather than stasis, and and intimacy rather than social documentary’s patronizing humanization.
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Citation
Comberg, Ella,
"Unreal City: Doug Rickard's Google Street View Photography"
(2020).
History of Art and Architecture Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/8hs3-rj92
