Hasta La Ideas

Photographer Doug Rickard travels the backroads of America on Google Street View

If photographer Doug Rickard had been able to get away from his daily life and go on the great American road trip like he wanted to, he might never have created the subtly powerful, deeply moving and award-winning images in the collection “A New American Picture.” Because he was unable to travel, Rickard sought other ways to see the country. He went online a lot, searching terms that might lead to images of places like Detroit, which to him symbolized “the mythology of the broken down American dream.” A few months after it was created, Rickard discovered Google Street View and, along with it, a higher calling.

He was floored by the fact that he could sit at home and “walk” the streets of any town, anywhere in the country. Rickard spent the next two years scouring Google Street View for images of the unseen America, starting in Detroit, though he soon discovered that there were countless other “Detroits” all over across America. He was stunned by towns like the 400-person town of Amite City, Louisiana, which has changed little since Ben Shahn photographed it more than 70 years ago.

Moving through the streets shot by Google’s Street View cameras, Rickard searched for vivid colors and compositions that have led critics to liken his work to Stephen Shore and William Eggleston. He also kept the idea of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” in the front of his mind, and recalls the sense of elation when he dropped into Watts in LA one day and discovered a man holding a hose against a stark white wall. Though there have been some grumblings about ownership and intellectual property, those have mostly been quashed by the power of Rickard’s work and his abilities to use—one might even say repurpose—a widespread technology to show us a new way of looking at what’s in front of our very eyes, which is what good photographers strive to do.

A limited edition of “A New American Picture” was published by White Press and Schaden in 2010, and even though it was named best book of 2010 by Photo-Eye Magazine and images were exhibited in the MoMA, it went out of print. Now, however, Aperture is re-releasing the book to a wider audience along with 40 new images.

“A New American Picture” is co-published by Koenig Books, and is available for pre-order on Amazon for $60. An accompanying exhibition will be on view 18 October through 24 November 2012 at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York.

Competition: Dezeen has teamed up with UK designers Dorothy to give readers the chance to win one of five prints of a fictional map that features locations named after film titles.

Reservoir Dogs, Jurassic Park and Nightmare on Elm Street are among the 900 titles used to create the map, which has districts dedicated to Hitchcock and cult British horror movies.

Loosely based on the style of a vintage Los Angeles street map, it includes an A-Z key at the base that lists all the films featured with their release dates and names of the directors.

The map is 80 centimetres wide by 60 centimetres high and can be purchased on the Dorothy website.

To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “Film Map” in the subject line. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers.

Read our privacy policy here.

Competition closes 21 August 2012. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeenmail newsletter and at the bottom of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.

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Industrial, urban and biological influences for a versatile design studio

Striking a balance between simplicity and intricacy, husband and wife design duo John and Svetlana (Lana) Briscella seamlessly merge their talents in Aminimal, a multifaceted studio that pushes the dimensions of industrial design. Aptly named, Aminimal aims to artfully spin the belief that minimal design comes from constrained concepts. “Aminimal has the word minimal inside but reads atypical, like something different,” Lana explains. Aminimal’s name is also often misconstrued as the word “animal”, a slip that the duo creatively embraces and occasionally integrates into their designs.

After meeting in Vienna, John and Lana set up shop in New York in 2011. Based in Brooklyn, the duo’s designs have an abstract, urbanist appeal. Culling from their travels and dwellings in various cities as well as from John’s academic background in Urban Strategies, Aminimal draws from the grid-like patterns of metropolitan spaces to create customized map mementos. Turning a memorable meeting place into commemorative and, in the case of the NYC Cork Board, functional art pieces, Aminimal celebrates “an emotional connection to the city.”

The couple spent time in Paris before landing in the States, and paying homage to their former haunt, Aminimal tested the limitations of dimensionality by re-interpreting the Louis XIV Ghost Armchair by designer Philippe Starck as a 3D cutout shroud of a map of Paris. Matching conceptual forwardness with technical precision, Aminimal uses a variety of tools. However, they cite their best tool as the “connection between our heart, brain and eyes.”

Initially exploring the energy of intersecting points through lamp designs—namely the polygonal-shaped Contact Window Lighting System—Aminimal added anatomy to the equation with its jewelry line, the Field Test Collection, which is “designed around the premise of structures found in magnetic fields.” The couple also created the Second Skin Watch, which swaps numbers for LED lights. The timepiece answers the age-old design challenge to “make a watch that’s not a watch”, presenting a futuristic study of the human hand’s natural contours, modeled after the flow of pouring water.

Aminimal’s innovative Calibration Stool and its Lounge counterpart, respectively evocative of a porcupine and spiny caterpillar, are made up of multiple wooden legs to create what they call a “3D rocking chair”. Bucking the notion that people remain creatures of habit, the Calibration Stool enables a person to move into a variety of seated positions by pivoting their weight against the numerous leg options.

Inspired by nature, Aminimal also turns to geometric formations. “In industrial design, you look for a line,” says John. “You’re looking to re-purpose analogies in your design. What I was looking for was, ‘What is the negative and positive of points and what is the reaction that causes the relationship?'”

A new body of work by artist Paula Scher takes a subjective look at topography

by Maj Hartov

Graphic design heavyweight Paula Scher‘s new book Maps covers her cartographic artwork since the late 1990s. She calls her large-scale paintings “distortions of reality,” as they comment on our world of information overload in a deeply personal way. When she was a child, Scher’s father—who wrote an introductory essay for the book—invented a device called Stereo Templates that helps correct the naturally occurring deviations in aerial photos used for creating maps. As a result, the artist grew up understanding that all maps contain distortions and used that riff on reality to guide her own interpretations. When Scher started painting her maps, she wanted to create them through her own altered lens, understanding that such inconsistencies were all around her as part of her everyday life—through her own work and the work of others.

Scher’s book of colorful, multilayered paintings present familiar geography in vibrant, thoughtful new ways. Besides being visually stunning, on closer look each map is crammed with geographical information. One titled “International Air Routes” includes airline hubs, flight routes, names of airlines and time zones, while another called “World Trade” outlines ports, trade routes and currencies. The book also features several pages of zoomed-in slices of each painting for closer examination of every angle of the maps.

With the book, Scher takes the reader on a virtual world tour with a twist and her “paintings of distortions” compel us to take a look at the idea of truth within our own reality in the process.

“Maps” is available from Amazon for $30.

Serie di mappe illustrate da Owen Gatley per Ling Magazine. Bravo!