Unsigned and inexpensively printed, Ruscha's photography books are antithetical to the traditional limited-edition livre d'artiste, or artist's book. Their banal subject matter and documentary style are indebted to the remarkable pictures of signs and vernacular architecture that American photographer Walker Evans made in the 1930s, but their deadpan, cool aesthetic is radically different. While each book chronicles an aspect of Los Angeles or the artist's round-trip drives between LA and Oklahoma, their use of photography as a form of map-making or topographical study signals a conceptual, rather than documentary, thrust.
Gallery label from The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook, April 16, 2012–April 29, 2013.