Photographer Doug Rickard, the son of a retired preacher, traveled each and every alleyway and business loop in America through Google Street View for two solid years to collect these unintentional stills — a selection of 80 from over 15,000 — each with a mix of apathy and empathy Rickard describes as “the inverse of the American Dream.” His work bears witness to invisiblized strati, a fading visual American poetry, and inch after inch of the American hinterlands, paradoxically cocooned by progress, as seen by nine-dimensional mounted cameras on Google vans endlessly traversing the nation.
The most moving thing, perhaps, about Rickard’s lens is its pained acknowledgement that not one stone remains unturned, and the age of adventure has closed — hopefully, and quite wholly, to be replaced by something beyond the physical.
