Unfolding to nearly twenty-five feet, this accordion-format book comprises a photocollage that captures both sides of a mile-and-a-half stretch of Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. To achieve this continuous image, Ruscha and his team mounted a motorized camera on the bed of his pickup truck. “All I was after was that store-front plane . . . It’s like a Western town in a way,” he later reflected. “A store-front plane of a Western town is just paper, and everything behind it is just nothing.” After producing this book, Ruscha was inspired to document other streets in LA, a practice he continued for more than fifty years.
Gallery label from ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, September 10, 2023 – January 13, 2024
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.