It’s a new year and one for which I am extremely optimistic. 2011 brought Occupy Wall Street, returning mass protest to our popular social conscience, and began a decade that will mark the 50th anniversary of important American events: the Civil Rights Act of 19654, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the public awareness of Robert Franks’ The Americans, published in 1959.

I suppose it’s the Roman origins of our number system that program us to think in fives, giving significance to multiples of this number in such forms as the automobile speed limits of 35, 65 and 80 and the emphasized celebration of bi-centennial, centennial, and 50 year anniversaries. This mathematical structure infiltrates our social structure and colors the zeitgeist with historical events aligning with these fifty and one-hundred-year cycles. In 2009 SF MOMA hosted Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” sharing the story of this project along with his photographic and biographic histories.

Bernd and Hilla Becher‘s work in post-World War 2 Germany photographed the industrial architecture of a country whose population was struggling the ramifications of rampant ideology. They photographed and thus recognized a social landscape that was predominately avoided due to the harsh and fresh political history. Similarly between 1955 and 1956 Frank photographed sectors of the American social landscape that were predominately avoided during the post-World War 2 economic boom. His photographs depicted a national identity/landscape contrary to a social climate of national growth, expansion, and international superiority. His photographs crossed the grain of national popular sentiment.

Doug Rickard‘s New American Pictures returns to the streets of American ghettos and the issue of racial inequality. Using Google Street view he’s navigated the most destitute roads of our country. As Frank utilized juke boxes, cars, gas stations and diners to denote the loneliness, angst, and alienation he saw in American life, Doug employs text, static camera position, and social iconography to communicate the segregation, aggression and terminality he sees contemporary African American life.

The visual strength of this work draws from modernist paradigms while his process charts a new photographic path into virtual reality. Doug’s photographs reflect the zeitgeist of approaching 50-year Civil Rights anniversaries and the how complexity of contemporary American life is a melding of technologically and physically generated stimuli. They reveal his hatred of racial inequality.

My friend and mentor Mike Smith said, “Robert Frank didn’t go out with a camera, he had a machine gun, and that thing was fully-loaded.” In thinking of my own process, I photograph some of the most painful things in my life because in that transmission from experience to object they are translated into something beautiful.