A406/Guidebooks and maps as art.

Before Google maps,A to Z’s and AA road maps, even before there were many roads and certainly before any signage and road names the new found car owners could use the Rand McNally Photo-Auto guide launched in 1906 to guide them. Essentially a series of photographs taken from the point of view of the driver with added text describing landmarks and juncture at which to turn left,right or straight on it could easily be described as a precursor to Google Street View and early use of the camera as a tool to aid motoring.Not unlike Google maps/street view it also suffered with the lack of updates only in the case of the Rand Mcnally these changes were far to rapid for it to ever catch up and so became redundant very quickly. Like Google Street View though these books have become a kind of work of art of their own.

In the case of Google many artists have used it within their work.One such contemporary artist is Doug Rickard who scours Google Street Map looking for unusual scenes and scenarios often taking place at junctions,much the way many artists in the past might have done in the “real” world from the windows of moving cars .

Rickard makes good use of Google’s image library to virtually explore the roads of America looking for forgotten, economically devastated, and abandoned places. After locating and composing these scenes of urban and rural decay, Rickard re-photographed the images on the computer screen with 35mm camera then represents them as part of a new form of document

The low-resolution images that Rickard favours have a dissolved, painterly effect, and sometimes have people in them,some of whom are aware of the camera but are of course anonymous and blurred,adding another layer of almost surrealistic isolation.

Rickard’s work knowingly references traditional American photographers such as Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Stephen Shore and whilst he acknowledges them he strives to move the tradition on using new technologies to document a world in which a camera mounted on a moving car can generate evidence of the people and places it is leaving behind. These images present a photographic portrait of the socially disenfranchised and economically powerless, those living an inversion of the American Dream, again exploring the outsiders,the peripheral.

Top: Pages from Rand Mcnally Photo-auto guide New York to Chicago circa 1906

Middle: Front cover of Rand Mcnally Photo-auto guide New York to Chicago circa 1906

Bottom: Doug Rickard from A New American Picture published by White Press/Schaden in 2010