May 27, 1968 – November 30, 2021, was an American artist and photographer whose work critically examined contemporary American society through images sourced from digital platforms. He became widely known for using technologies such as Google Street View and YouTube, photographing found images directly from computer screens and recontextualizing them as photographic works.

Educated in U.S. history and sociology, Doug Rickard developed a practice shaped by a critical view of American culture, politics, and social inequality. Rather than working with a traditional camera in the field, he appropriated publicly available digital imagery, focusing on marginalized communities, surveillance, and the visual consequences of mass image production in the internet age.

His most influential photobook, A New American Picture (2010), is considered a landmark of 21st-century documentary photography. Drawing formal and conceptual inspiration from books such as Walker Evans’s American Photographs and Robert Frank’s The Americans, Rickard used Google Street View to depict impoverished and racially segregated areas across the United States. The book was widely exhibited, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and was included in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s The Photobook: A History.

A related body of work, N.A. (2013), was sourced from YouTube videos and focuses on violence, crime, and the dynamics of online spectatorship. Alongside his artistic work, Rickard founded and published the influential photography platform American Suburb X, which became an important resource for contemporary photographic discourse. His work is held in major museum collections and remains central to discussions about photography, appropriation, and digital visual culture.

Reference
Biography text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), English edition. Retrieved January 19, 2026.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Rickard_(photographer)