Tom

Tom is a book of vintage found photographs assembled by the artist Doug Rickard, published by Little Big Man Books in a limited edition, now out of print.

Rickard built the book around a cache of anonymous photographs — black-and-white images from the 1960s of women, stockinged and stylish, shot from a distance on the streets of Los Angeles by an unknown photographer. Named for the peeping Tom, the book presents these images with their voyeuristic origin intact rather than smoothed over, letting the era's noir-tinged nostalgia sit alongside the plain fact of covert surveillance.

Rickard is known for photographic projects built from appropriated and remote-sourced imagery, including his Google Street View series A New American Picture. Tom extends that interest in found and secondhand ways of seeing into an explicitly voyeuristic historical archive, using it to draw a line from Cold War-era street surveillance to the present.